Why Natalie Harp Is Trump's Most Sinister Goon

Natalie Harp is, as you say, a great fictional character for the kind of fiction I like. Most of them are just so caricatured cartoons. She's more interesting to me. I don't have her entirely figured out. The best I could think of, and I think it's really the best, and it's not a woman, it's not a novel, it is in The Simpsons, Smithers, who is Mr. Burns' assistant, who is crazily devoted, and also has sexual fantasies about Burns, which is so hilarious and weird. She is a rich fictional character, only because the whole nature of her motives and intention are unclear, except for like, whoa. She's like a stalker, in effect. She's a stalker who got the job. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast Podcast. What kind of novel? Is a character like Natalie Harp from? Well, we're going to get into it today with a man who is brilliant at synthesizing the madness of what's going on, the nonfiction aspects of our culture, with a, well, the imagination of a novelist. I'm talking about Kurt Anderson, the man who, when he was at Spy Magazine, came up with the wonderful expression, short-fingered Bulgarian, for Donald Trump. We are going to be talking about how he imagines Donald Trump's death in his book. But also about the characters around Donald Trump, and how, well, how fleshed out some of them are, and how utterly two-dimensional and incompetent others are. But before we do that, I just want to remind you to subscribe to The Daily Beast. So press the subscription button wherever you're receiving this podcast, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever. Share it with a friend. And also to remind you that The Daily Beast is. It's now on Substack. So wherever you are, we are too. You can go to thedailybeast.substack.com. Thedailybeast.substack.com. All right. Now, I've been longing to talk to Kurt about who's the author that could have created a character like Natalie Harp, a lovesick, omnipresent character. And, well, let's get into it with Kurt Anderson. Kurt Anderson, congratulations on The Breakup. This is the official publication week. Yep. I want you to sign it for me at the end of the podcast. It will take me a long, long time to figure out exactly the fulsome and generous things I should say. Many fulsome and generous things. Mark, it seems like the perfect time to talk to someone like you who straddles nonfiction and fiction in this moment of hyper-drama. And I wanted to ask you. We're going to go on and talk about the central premise of the book. And for those who missed your last episode where we talked about you imagining the death of Donald Trump, because that's a moment in the book which is set in the near future, I want to come back to that. But I want to come first to Natalie Harp, who seems to me like a novelist's character. I mean, she's incredible as a character. And I wanted to sort of throw her to you as a subject. Because she's a mix of many female characters we recognize from novels and from movies. But she's also her own special creation and a Trumpian creation. And who better to discuss her than the man who has been tracking Trump since his origins. Since my youth. Since your youth and since his youth. And then I want to get your review of your old Coke Dealers new podcast, Robert Kennedy. Kennedy Jr.'s Food Podcast. But let's start with Natalie Harp. Yeah. And for secondary characters in a novel I might write. As opposed to Pete Hegseth, who's just ridiculous. I mean, most of them are just so caricatured cartoons. And yes, there are certainly female characters in classic fiction who have some resemblance to her. I think of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, maybe, or something. Oh, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. That's a good one. Because she's this sinister, all-person figure. And in love, erotically, perhaps, with the dead woman. You know, anyway. Oh, you think she was in love with Rebecca? There's a charge there, I think. Interesting. Interesting. So I had a couple of others that I thought of for her. And as I say, she could be a Dickens character. Although Dickens never did. He never did her, or a person like her, because all of his many innocent, you know, idealistic people were rescued. They weren't really evil. They were true believers. Then there's the Uriah Heaps, around whom many are in Trump's circle. I was just going to say, he seems like the model. Uriah Heap is the model for those cabinet meetings where they all sit around Scott Besson and says, Mr. President, there is no one finer than you. Yes. And I think she's, I mean, I think she's different. I think she is more, in a certain way, unwell than the rest of them because she's so, you know, devoted in an uncanny and, as I say, maybe mentally disordered way. So, but, you know, so I think it's not the character so much, although Barnaby Rudge, the Dickens character, who had a book named after him, you know, is a simple, idealistic character who just doesn't understand the world and gets caught up in a political, you know, political battles that he doesn't understand, led by a demagogue. So there's that. The one that I, oh, and then I also thought of Orwell. I just keep thinking of British authors. In Animal Farm, there's this, the horse, there's a horse, a hardworking cart horse named Boxer. And there's, of course, this tyrannical pig who runs the show. And he's incredibly loyal, the horse. His two tenants, dictums are I Will Work Harder and Napoleon, the name of the tyrant dictator. Napoleon is always right. And he's betrayed in the end and sent off to a slaughterhouse by the dictator. So that's Trumpian. The best. Very Trumpian. The best I could think of, though, I think, and I think it's really the best, and it's not a woman, it's not a novel. It is in The Simpsons. Smithers. Smithers? Who is Mr. Burns' assistant, who is crazily devoted and also has sexual fantasies about Burns, which is so hilarious and weird. And I was looking, I saw, I was looking in, through old Simpsons episodes, descriptions of them. There's one episode in particular where Smithers is on vacation and he communicates to Burns, I have a lot of free time on my hands. If you FedEx me your mail, I'd be happy to open it and return it to you. Which, I mean, could be a Natalie Harp line. Could be a Natalie Harp line. So there, yes. But it's truly, she is a rich fictional character only because the whole nature of her motives and intention are unclear except for like, whoa. Like, she's like a stalker, in effect. Right, right. That's so good. A stalker who got the job. And is Trump oblivious to the stalkery nature of it? Or do you think he likes the stalkery nature? I mean, we've talked a lot at The Daily Beast about, and we've audited her public calendar. And, you know, Melania Trump really hasn't been around very much. She's the least visible first lady of the century. She hasn't been around for a month. We literally haven't seen her for a month. What do you think Trump makes of this? What's his adoration from Natalie Harp? It's a good question because, of course, Trump won. Trump's attitude toward the sycophants, and he demands sycophancy from everyone. Although, it really seems, and I really believe that in almost all those cases, he knows it's transactional. He knows it's inauthentic because his own feelings are inauthentic and he can't imagine authentic feelings because he has none other than the fact that he's a sycophant. Other than, I want, or pay attention to me, you know? But in her case, from his talk about her and that one amazing line, I guess in Regime Change, where he's quoted as saying to his other aides, like, she's the only one that really cares about me. Right, you'll all leave me. You'll all leave me. She cares about me as much as my children and wife, you know? And his children and his wife don't seem to care about him that much. I mean, his older daughter has disappeared, and the stalker element is interesting because she seems to have remade herself as Ivanka. There's an Ivankification of Natalie Hart, which is, you know, fairly evident. Yes, it's amazing to me, actually, that. And I hadn't thought of that until it was noted by somebody I read recently and showed me a picture and saw this picture. It's quite something. He's now dating her, as he once said he would like to do. Well, he said. Well, he said that Ivanka was really hot, didn't he? And if she weren't his daughter, he would date her. I think he said that to Howard Stern, probably. He also, he said it other, it wasn't the only time, but yes. So she fulfills a certain fantasy for him. Yes. And, and will do obviously literally anything he needs or wants or even beyond what he needs or wants, like some, you know, crazy AI chat bot brought to life, you know, what, oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Running after him and, oh, let me help you more. That's a great idea, Mr. President. It's really like, we see that today in daily life when you use chat bots, unless you tell the chat bot to stop. Right. To stop being quite so sycophantic. Isn't this what all men want? I mean, has Trump finally in his position? Only in our porn fantasies, I think. Right. Okay. So she's a porn fantasy that's come to life. Of a kind. Yeah. But, you know, yes, I think that's part of it. And again, I, who knows if there's any sexual relationship or, I mean, anybody for that matter, you know. Michael Wolff could tell us much more about that or speculate more authoritatively about Well, I think. I don't know. He says that people in the White House assume that Trump is post-sex. I saw that or heard that perhaps on the Daily Beast podcast. Well, I would hope so. But, yeah, I can imagine that to be true. I mean, and, but, but on the other hand, there's post-sex and there's, you know, whatever, say, when he was certainly not post-sex, Bill Clinton did in the Oval Office that wasn't exactly. His definition under testimony, sex. Right. It wasn't, he didn't have sexual relations. With that woman. Exactly. Yeah. So Smithers is a very interesting one. And that's just made me think of Lloyd in Entourage. Did you ever watch Entourage? Which one was, yes, I did. Lloyd was Ari Gold's assistant. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. He was a slavish assistant. Yes. And he was constantly harassed, always worrying that he wasn't meeting Ari Gold, who was famously based on Ari Emanuel, Trump's agent, or at one point, Donald Trump's agent. And always anxious he wasn't performing his master's duty. Yes. No, that's a, that's a good one. And indeed, the show business assistant genre of person is full of those people. Yes. And Trump came from showbiz. Came from, stayed in. Yes. Stayed in showbiz. Yeah. So regular listeners and viewers to the podcast may remember last time you came on, you talked about imagining Donald Trump's death for the book, because the book is set in the near future. For those who weren't here for that particular moment, will you read the, the paragraph in the book where you imagine Donald Trump's death? I will. And I want to reassure readers who maybe have some Trump fatigue that this, there's only a minimum of Donald Trump in this book, set in the future. For all the bad things that happen in this book, his presence is not one of them. So it's a sort of backstory flashback reference to when he died 10 years before the book takes place. And this is set in 2035. '45. 2045. He dies in 2035. He dies in 2035. He's, well, I think this passage explains what he's doing. They're looking back and thinking about, talking about the summer of 2035 before the uprising and civil war began and they got to where they got. And that summer, the book says, "The anger on the right erupted spectacularly last summer. In sometimes violent protests, starting with the spontaneous one that spilled out of the Trump Tower atrium in Manhattan after the 89-year-old former president died there of a massive brainstem stroke while on the famous escalator, going down to a 20th anniversary celebration of his first presidential candidacy. A large contingent of the attendees were pardoned rioters from the January 6th Capitol riot 15 years ago. And ICE agents he'd pardoned. As well, they crowded into Trump's bar, 45, 47 wine and whiskey, then streamed outside on Fifth Avenue, chanting "deep state assassins, deep state assassins" and started smashing store windows and bashing pedestrians. The ferocity endured in the year since. So what was it like imagining that and why did you have him dying of a stroke on his escalator? Well, it's funny. It's a very arresting passage. When you're reading the book. Well, I am, you know, so I, I, I wanted to get him out of the way this, this, this passage in this memory, uh, is, is, uh, or actually reporting from back then is, is I wanted to get out of the way. It's the longest reference to Donald Trump or the only scene with him in the book. So I wanted to get out of the way that he's gone, that he's not in this story except hovering over as part of the precursor life of America. And I thought, oh, I'll try to write just more than, say, he died in 2035 of natural causes. So I wanted to make it natural causes. I wanted to make it in this famous, iconic part of his rise, going down the golden escalator. And then imagine how that might take place and why it might take place. And then I never, for instance, put two and two together that that announcement happened two days after his birthday. So birthday party, celebration of himself. It all made sense. And there'd be cameras. And, you know. So he dies on television. Correct. Like he lives. It's the show. Yeah. It's the show. And again, precisely. And, you know, again, if nothing else is true of Donald Trump, he wants to be the star of the show every single day that he can by whatever means necessary. And in a way, you know, he wouldn't be unhappy to die this way. I mean, of course, everybody's unhappy to die. I suppose. But if you're going to die, do it on TV with a clip that can be replayed a gazillion times on every platform that exists in 2035. Well, and then, obviously, it inspires riots, too. Because you want your death to matter, perhaps, if you're Donald Trump. And his loyal, you know, violent subjects to show their loyalty and violence, how angry they are. Yeah, it would, in its way, for whatever. I mean, I think the satisfaction people who despise Donald Trump might take in seeing this depiction of a possible future. Yes, the real guy, the character or the real guy, and what's the difference, would be happy to see, ah, no, they were still loyal even after I was gone, you know? Deep state assassin. Yeah, Natalie Harp running ahead of them like the French, you know, leader of the revolution woman. Right. I was going to say, if you're writing the book now, you might. You might have included Natalie Harp silently sobbing at the bottom of the escalator. Might have. Although, you know, I knew that certain characters that I could have put in this book would have a, you know, a half-life that might not last even to the fall of 2026. Yes. So, the book uses a central metaphor of a marriage disintegrating to reflect on the disintegration of America. And America splits into the United States. And the free American republic. Do you actually think that's likely? Do you think that at this point America is too divided? Well, I find it, I find this idea of both of disunion or breaking apart peacefully or violently less far-fetched than I did when I started thinking about, certainly when I started writing this book. Started writing it. Less than four years ago. So, it seems more, not inevitable, nothing's inevitable, but more plausible. And so, I think it's, and I think it's a good story that is imaginable by people today. But no, I don't think it's, I wouldn't say likely. And this is why it's a novel and not a nonfiction book. It doesn't matter if it's likely. But I think it's highly plausible. And in the, you know, we as citizens. Of America and the world. I think having this, the whole backstory of how it gets there and the politics that happened in the next 10 years to get there and all of that. And how, how this country would, could possibly, this giant country that couldn't be just, you know, Brexitized or divided by states or anything. How that would logistically have to happen. And to see that all through a couple of people's eyes. My characters. You know, who, who, who live it and see it and whose own marriage has its frictions that are not unconnected to the politics of, of the time. So, I don't think it's likely, but I think it's, it's more plausible than, you know, a zombie invasion or, you know, I mean, I think it's, I think it's in the realm of the plausible, you know. The intelligence community assigns percentages to the possibility of things like civil wars in other countries and they always have or whatever's in other countries. Mm-hmm. And which I. Mentioned at one point in the book. And, you know, I suspect other intelligence agencies, if not our own, would, would, you know, would be raising the percentage possibility of that future contingency. Yeah, I haven't been on Cal State or Poly Market, the prediction markets, but it'd be interesting to know what they. I don't even know if they have that net. Yeah, maybe they're not allowed to. I'm not sure. Really? I don't know. Yeah, it seems they're allowed to. What are they not allowed to do? Tell me what they're not allowed to do. The one thing they're not allowed to do is you're not allowed. how to bet on someone dying. - Okay. - So, and actually in the book I was encouraged by the fact that it's not that many people that are killed. It's around sort of 40,000, right? All in. 28,000, I think, non-terrorists. But yeah, it's in the low tens of thousands, which is, and it only lasts a year and a half. And as you, and you may have actually been a partial inspiration for my character, Natalie, but, well, I don't know, partially, partially. Oh, that's so exciting. But in being like, well, you know, could be worse, which is one of her recurring phrases, you know, it was terrible. And she says it's horrible, it's horrible what happened, as she's remembering back when the war started nine years before the book takes place. But, listen, if it were a civil war like the last civil war, millions would have died, you know, and so forth and so on. So, yeah, not, you know, too many people died, but, you know, and every death is terrible, but here we are. But here we are. So the other thing I'm interested in is, I find it very difficult to read fiction right now because, Uh-huh. Well, because we are living in such a time of actual drama and, obviously, we're chronicling it through the beast every day. Yeah. What I loved about this book is that it's set in the near future. As you say, it's plausible what you imagine, but it's not dystopian. And almost every book that's set in the future, even if it doesn't have zombies in, feels like we're hurtling towards an Orwellian world, and that's not what you depict. So can you just talk about why you made it not, not dystopian? Because it feels like you've just imagined something happening 20 years from now. Yeah, well, I'm glad you took that away because that was my intention. I mean, I, for lots of reasons, including did I want to spend three years saying, well, you think this is bad? Wait till you see what happens. So. It's also, can I make the added point? It's also not sci-fi because I also don't want to read sci-fi books. Well, exactly. You know, yes, AI is pervasive, more pervasive than ever. And when you read the book, you find surprises where you didn't even know it existed in the story and the characters. There are plenty of robots. It is the future, but it's not the subject. It's just in passing here and there to say, oh, yeah, he's waiting outside his elevator with a bunch of robots kind of thing. So, no, I didn't want to make it sci-fi. I wanted to make it about people after this radical transformative set of changes and experiences. In America, and I wanted, you know, again, I, you know, I don't begin. I want to provide readers with a takeaway of some hope, but in fact, I do. It's not exactly a happy ending. It's an ambiguous, ambivalent ending, but it's not hopeless. It's not despairing. And that's, to me, an easy default, given the despair and frankly, dystopian moment in which we saw and often feel we're living in this country. Well, it's also optimistic because it's what is it? Six hundred pages at a time when the five something five, five hundred. So shorter than most Dickens novels, really. But Dickens novels, at least we're sorry, I know we can read it one chapter at a time. No, I was going to ask you, do you think as an author that people's attention spans are still intact? Well, it's a good question. What do I know? I mean, I know that people are still, you know, writing me about books I published, you know, five, six, nine years ago and saying how much they just read them and it changed their lives and all that kind of thing. So, I mean, some people are, smart people are, or whatever people, I don't want to judge. Yes, I do. But no, I think, you know, reading fiction or literary fiction is always in a minority taste, right? So, I mean, yes, everybody read Dickens. But, so, I'm not, I mean, you know, yes, The Atlantic, who published an excerpt from this book not long ago. I saw that. I saw they published an excerpt. You know, had their big cover story on readings of Dad and Readings Over. You know, that's a pretty broad brush to paint with. So, I don't know. I mean, publishing, you know, I mean, what sells well at a certain point changes and changed recently in the last year or so from, oh, nonfiction is everything. Now, no, fiction is more. But in terms of people not reading books, I don't know. I don't think so. But I understand that to the degree we are, you know, eating the snacks on our phones hours and hours a day and it's hard to, you know, get off of them, that undoubtedly, and I feel it in my own life, I have to more, like, almost like, oh, I have to go walk three miles a day. I have to go, you know, I feel that way. Not everybody does. Like, my wife is as voracious a reader, nonstop, as she has ever been. And so, I have this person in my household who is a counterexample. I think also that nonfiction books are suffering a, well, they're suffering at the moment because people have gone on to podcasts and because the world feels like it's moving so fast that by the time you pick up a nonfiction book, the world has moved on. Well, except. The incredible success of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's regime change this summer is an extraordinary counterexample of that. There's Trump fatigue. People are tired of it. People are tired of nonfiction. Well, not if it's really good and, you know, authoritative and all the rest. So, you know, and there's always been, and, you know, I wrote a book called Fantasyland, an appetite for escape and fantasy of various types and flavors. And so, fiction, whether it's literally the fantasy genre or not, provides that in a way. You know, the other thing is, I was thinking about this and you said you wanted to talk about it. I thought the thing about our, those of us who follow politics closely, which is not most people, but perhaps most of your listeners. We have a very engaged political audience. But I think. For the rest of people, I think the focus on politics these days, given social media, given hourly, daily updates on the news media, I think it makes it easy for any of us to start effectively dehumanizing others, people you disagree with, as like just characters on a game, characters on a screen. And therefore, good novels. Of a certain kind, certainly of the kind I try to write, can really get inside individuals with whom you may disagree and a lot. And but it's not just, oh, they're this, I hate them or it's this, they're good. And, you know, the grays of good and bad and all kinds of things with these, with my characters and certainly my main two, but others, too, the grays are the interesting things that you can only get from novels or film or good film. But you don't get from. You know, most nonfiction. I mean, to me, the better nonfiction is about these subjects, the more it goes into that, you know, new journalism, fiction like. Or memoirs or biographies where you get the complexity of people's lives and the nuances of them. Precisely. I mean, what I like about the relationship in there, in the book, too, is that they're both nuanced characters and we all have people in our lives who we love and who are very complicated. And in theory on paper, you know, you wouldn't like each other, but you do. Yes. Or you should like each other and you don't. And that's what the book, I think, explores alongside a different sense of America. And I was thinking also that your book, it's less optimistic than your book that we first actually met over the tale of the century that you wrote. Turn of the Century. Turn of the Century. Yeah. At the end of the millennium. So it came out right in 1999, right? And this book feels a little less optimistic than that. That book was written in the present tense and it had a different, well, perhaps you were at a different stage of your writing life. Certainly that. It was my first novel. But yes, it was a very different time. It was the 90s. In some ways, the happiest decade of, you know, recent history, right? I mean, things were booming. You know, freedom was booming. You know, popping up. And freedom felt like it was a right that was unassailable. Right. And that nothing would really change. And this has been the end of history idea. Right. You know, we're done changing. You know, neoliberal democracy has won. It's done. There's no more struggle. Right. The Berlin Wall had just come down. It all felt so optimistic. All of it. All of it. And it was early in the digital age, right, when nothing was bad about it yet. It was just, wow, interesting. We're in the future. And again, that was not set. That was set in the near future of two years in the near future, which was just a trick that I did for myself and I hope for the readers to make it to emphasize the futuristic nature of life today at the turn of the century. So, but yeah, I was more optimistic, even though. And then when I realized to those, whatever, the common readership of that novel and this one, and I've already, a couple of them have already said, yeah, there are, I realized And I realized I was writing a kind of, not sequel in any sense, But a bookend echo of, oh, married couple, time of great social ferment, they have problems, whatever is happening in the society and media and technology, politics at large. So I decided, well, I will connect them. So the Asher, the main character in this, is the nephew of the female main character in that book and back and forth because they are similar, you know, and or they're connected, they're kindred, they share DNA. But I hadn't thought of that thing you said, that was more optimistic. But yeah, it was, I suppose. It was, definitely. There was no pessimism about the state of play. Right. There was assumption that this was the new way. I mean, yeah, precisely. And we have arrived at this new thing and really political struggle of the kind we've faced for the last decade and more in this country getting worse and worse or not. Yes, worse and worse in many ways and dysfunctional as well. Well, and the division. Yes, that was not on the radar. It should have been, of course, and one of the reasons the Democratic Party, the largest, the single largest mistake the Democratic Party made in the last, in my lifetime, was leaving behind its history as a labor party, as a party that really cares about the working class. And, you know, and that had, that was already happening in the 80s and 90s, the industrialization and the rest. But, you know. We were partying like it was 1999. Right. And also we had younger leaders. So you had Bill Clinton and you had Tony Blair, both of whom felt young, enthusiastic. And you didn't feel the division in the way that you feel the division now because as leaders, they didn't prey on it. Well, yes. And as leaders, U.S. presidents, I don't know about prime ministers, never preyed on it the way this freak does. This freak. Yeah. You spotted that freak early on, early on was, you know, with your term, the short-fingered vulgarian. Yes. When you and Graydon Carter were having fun at Spy magazine. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor. More fun and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. So I was going to ask you your thoughts on John Ossoff, who suddenly surfaced. And I think it's probably fair to say that the Georgia senator is now certainly all eyes on him after he highlighted the fact that the president doesn't appear to do his job. He doesn't want to do his job. What he wants to do is travel with Natalie in grift force. One, his new luxury plane gifted by the Emir of Qatar. Among the Democratic candidates or potential candidates for 2028, and he hasn't said he is one, but he's certainly rapidly emerging as a hopeful. Please. Yeah. What do you think of him? What do you make of him? Well, I am as attracted as many people are by him. He definitely is the it guy of person of this moment among the contenders. And what's that about? It's so interesting, the combination of things it's about. He looks good, but not too good in a Gavin Newsom-y way. And he looks better. He looks like he just gets up like that in the morning. He doesn't look like he spends a lot of time in the mirror. He's not pretty. He's good looking, and he's been working out. So he looks good. But more than that, of course, is his combination of, to me, a very appealing combination of going low and going up. Going high. That line that you paraphrased or virtually quoted that he gave about Trump flying in, you know, his Air Force One around the world and doing what he does was, I mean, mentioning Natalie Harp and referring to her as Natalie rather than Natalie Harp. Right. Whoa. It was, it was, it was, I don't know. You don't want to say below the belt as the White House did, because everything out of the White House is below the belt. It was perfect, because it suggested that you all know who I'm talking about. And I don't have to be the old-fashioned formal person that says, you know, Presidential Assistant Miss Natalie Harp. I just say Natalie. And it implies the, you know, informality in a possibly, slightly, maybe kind of salacious way. It was beautiful. So, but meanwhile, he's giving this. High-minded, almost Obama-like speech about, you know, the problems of the Republicans and Donald Trump. So, it's a lovely combination. And it's not the first great speech he gave. I mean, he's been giving great speeches. And he is, I would say, just on the orator level, he's the best I've seen of these contenders. Doesn't mean he'd be a great president. But, you know, I mean, whoever can get elected, it might be. You know? Well, there was also the moment where he. Faces down Jay Clayton and says to him as he's being, you know, for the Office of National Intelligence. And he says, isn't it humiliating that you can't just say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election? As we discussed, I think the last time I was here, that was beautiful, too. So, you know, two home runs. And, you know, and that makes you a contender. You know, I mean, it's not quite, wow, look at this guy, Barack Obama, at the 2004 Democratic Convention. It was basically his holy cow introduction to the world and all of us as this guy's an up-and-comer. This black guy is an up-and-comer. So, I don't know if these last weeks and months have been Ossoff's version of that. If he gets elected president, yes, they were. But, yeah, I think he's, I get why he's excited. And, you know, and then there's all kinds of specific political reasons. I think he's, one can imagine him being a good candidate is. Yes, he's Jewish. And one Jewish friend of mine says, I don't want a liberal Democrat who likes John Ossoff, likes, doesn't dislike Josh Shapiro. I don't want a Jewish candidate who will just bring up, there's too much focus on the horror of Israel now. And that was interesting. But I think because John Ossoff's view of Israel and Palestine has been so, you know, correctly, but not incendiarily, you know, sensible and left-ish, but certainly at the middle of where I think the Democratic Party is today, and probably America, I think that puts him in good stead. And it's not a recent flip-flop. This is how he's been about that subject. So, you know, we'll see. Who knows? Nobody knows. I mean, as William Goldman said about show business, nobody knows anything in terms of the studios and who's going to, what's going to be a hit or anything. It's true. God knows of politics and presidential politics more than anything. Never. All right. So one thing that does seem to be clear, however, is that your former Coke dealer. Who are you talking about? My one and only former. I know, but what a good story. And for those of you who haven't seen Kurt talking about Biden. I've done it many, many times on this. Well, I was going to say, you should go and look at a previous podcast because it's such a wonderful story, especially after you inadvertently steal his straw, which with his nasal juices, he's convinced has grown. He's convinced he's made a lot of money and he's making special crystals, which are of enormous benefit health-wise. If I'd only had kept that. Imagine how valuable that thing would be. Smithsonian contribution eventually. Well, it possibly could be an entire cave of stalagmites on stalactites at this point. There you go. But he has, as Health and Human Services Secretary, created a new podcast. I sent you the second episode with Jeffrey Zakarian. It's about how to cook. And this week's episode is how to make an omelet. Did you watch it? I tasted it. I skimmed it. I didn't have time during this frenzied publication week to watch the entire thing. But yes, I did. And it was remarkable because, again, the last time we talked, I think we were talking about it. I think he's slightly moving away and preparing for his post-Donald Trump administration continuing fame and political future, I think. And this is in its odd. You know, Usha Vance doing her children's story podcast version of, oh, look, I'm just a normal person. Look, or whatever. It's not off. Well, it is off brand-ish, given that he usually, you know, he's known best for, you know, eating raw bear and stuff. You know, I mean. And also cocaine off a toilet seat. Well, cocaine off a toilet seat. Not that I ever witnessed, of course, unless that's where he went when he went to get his Coke. So he scooped it for you off a toilet seat. That's depressing. Yeah. So it was remarkable. It was like a thing he'd never thought about. But here he's going to talk about it, you know, on that podcast. And, again, it's like, I mean, one could imagine the broad satire of, oh, so, you know, Mr. Himmler, I understand you love cooking strudel. Tell me about that in 1938 on the radio. You know what I mean? But it's interesting. Not that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Himmler, but, you know, what I'm saying. Well, he's definitely behind the rise of measles in the country. Well, and a longer-term rise that I'm worried about beyond measles epidemic, possible measles epidemic today is, I mean, some things that the Trump administration has done badly, like, say, RNA, could be fixed overnight. Not, you know, you'd still have to reset up the structures overseas. Well, and you have to rekindle trust of Americans. Well, that. But I'm saying some things could be rebuilt. But things like the scientific medical establishment that does research and is there and all of it, that's not going to be as easy or as instant fix if we have the political will and people who want to fix it. So that really concerns me. And in that sense, in terms of long-term damage, what he and his. his, you know, fantasy land confreres are doing at the Health and Human Services and at FDA and the rest to screw up what was, for all of its imperfections, like every other government thing in the world, a very strong and good public health system, the CDC, the FDA, all of it. And, you know, and to the degree he's trashing that, and not trashing it just as entirely out of ignorance or a show, like. Elon Musk with Doge, like, oh, let's fire these people. We don't know what they're doing. Get rid of them or all that stuff. This is knowing and deliberate and part of an agenda that I still don't understand why Donald Trump or the Republicans are indulging, except, oh, this is a constituency we can maybe get, the Maha people. I don't know. But, no, it's a. He's a dangerous character. And, you know, from narcotics dealer to, you know, different kinds of health and medical danger, there's a through line. Right. And vaccine denial. Oh. It's just sort of shocking because you'll also get a generation of people who haven't been vaccinated against really pernicious diseases that, you know, modern science has allowed us to basically eradicate. Well, and again, it's been so long. I mean, I am old enough to, as a child, have gotten the polio vaccine. Well, I got it too. Yeah. You know, all these things that were, that killed a lot of people and made, it miserated people and were dangerous. And not just polio, lots of things. And, wow, that was amazing. We, and mostly we, the United States, you know, had these medical breakthroughs again and again and again during the 1950s and 60s about infectious disease and viral disease and like, well, no, we don't believe it. I mean, that's, you know, that is one of the problems of this fantasyland phenomenon where it's not just, wow, they believe this crazy thing. They believe this crazy thing that is hurting the rest of us potentially. I mean, it's, I'm reminded of a line of Thomas Jefferson's before he was president, before the United States was fully formed, where he said about religious freedom and religious freedom, he wanted to be in Virginia's constitution, was, he said that his point was, I don't care if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no gods. It's fine with me as long as he doesn't pick my pocket or break my leg. Exactly. That is American laissez-faire tolerance. But they're, you know, his boss is picking our pocket and he's breaking our legs, you know, so. So maybe the longer and the more episodes of his cooking podcast he does, the better, because then he's at least out of the office. The thing that struck me about it, watching him, was just how unengaged he looked in poor Jeffrey Zakarian, the second chef, the first chef. I now can't remember his name, but both chefs were trying very hard to capture his interest and get eye contact. And Robert Kennedy looked utterly bored and somewhat angry to be there in the first place. So I think he should smile more, take a lesson from Aaron. My wife says about me, I'm television as well. Aaron Burr's line, smile more, say less. Smile. Was that an Aaron Burr line? Yeah. Well, there was a, you know, a guy who could have been our first horrible president. He says it to Hamilton, or at least that's what he says in the musical, which has been so many times. Does he sing it or does he say it? No, he says, he sings it. Yeah. He sings it. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, in this, I mean, as the 2028 Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns are, come together, I mean, we shouldn't. We shouldn't look at this as just all a show ourselves, but my gosh, it's going to be so interesting with the Bobby Kennedy factions versus the J.D. Vance factions versus the Rubio and Lord knows who else. Well, Kurt Anderson, thank you so much. We'll be having you back lots of times to talk about that run up to 2028. Yeah, yeah. Well, and then. In the meantime, can you sign your copy of The Breakup? I will indeed. Great. I will sign it briefly and then later add the long, intimate. Long and full. Awesome dedication, please. I loved Kurt's analysis of Natalie Harper's, the stalker who got the job. She's everywhere. She was with the president on Food Truck One. And what are her qualifications to be the gatekeeper to the most important man in our country? And, well, frankly, the world. It is an astonishing story. It has so much of this Trump presidency has turned out to be. Well, we'll be tracking it again tomorrow with David Rothkopf. And we'll be back with Michael Wolff on Tuesday to go inside Donald Trump's head. Leave us your comments from your favorite parts of today's conversation. We love the comments. Send us your limericks. We love reading them. We don't always get to every single one of them, but we try. And I respond to as many comments as I possibly can. The telephone number. For you to leave us comments is also on the description box of this podcast. So if you have been a big thank you for joining us. And of course, as always, a big thank you to our production team. Brian Murray, John Romero, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many B-Beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support.