https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/opinion/tucker-carlson-trump-groypers-fuentes.html
Opinion
Guest Essay
Opinion
Guest Essay
Who’s Afraid of Tucker Carlson? I Can Think of Two People.
November 18, 2025
New York Times
Credit: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
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by Thomas B. Edsall
[Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.]
Sometimes a seemingly modest event can open the door to a wider understanding of significant political change. The furor over the decision made by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, to defend Tucker Carlson after his sympathetic interview with Nick Fuentes, an ardent fan of Adolf Hitler, is one of those illuminating moments.
The Roberts controversy has focused attention on the duplicity of the Trump administration in simultaneously making accusations of antisemitism to extort millions from liberal colleges and universities while disregarding indisputable examples of racial and ethnic animosity within its own ranks.
By refusing to place responsibility for antisemitism within Republican ranks on any constituency on the right, Vice President JD Vance has emerged as a master — or perhaps ultimately the victim — of equivocation as he struggles to maintain support from competing right-wing factions.
Fuentes himself captured the conflicting pressures on Vance, arguing in a video on Nov. 3 that the vice president:
is getting squeezed because the Groypers are on the one hand saying: “Hey, listen, fat boy, we want America first. You want to run for president? We want to hear you say America first.” And on the other side, he’s got his donors, and they’re saying: “They’re horrible antisemites. You have to disavow them. You have to forcefully condemn them. Condemn Tucker. Condemn the Groypers.”
Many on the MAGA right believe that critics are using Roberts as a weapon to weaken Trumpism, to damage a potential Vance presidential campaign in 2028 and to restore the pre-Trump establishment to power.
The antisemitism debate has also exposed a generational and ideological split among Republican activists, as growing numbers of younger Republicans endorse a radical nihilism that verges on an open embrace of fascism, to a degree far more extreme than anything contemplated by their elders.
Perhaps most significantly, the Roberts-Carlson-Fuentes controversy demonstrates that the wounds from the 1992 contest between the paleoconservative faction led by Pat Buchanan and the establishment wing led by George H.W. Bush continue to fester despite — or, more realistically, because of — Donald Trump’s domination of the party.
As a starting point, it’s worth giving a close read to excerpts from Roberts’s videotaped statement on Oct. 30 defending Carlson:
Today, I want to be clear about one thing. Christians can critique the State of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course, antisemitism should be condemned. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America.
In a direct challenge to conservatives who see an unbreakable link between the United States and Israel, Roberts, who oversaw the creation of Project 2025, the Trump administration’s policy guidebook, tells viewers;
Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.
The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now.
Roberts then raises the tone of his rhetoric to new heights:
We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve on someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.
Roberts may not have understood just how provocative his choice of words and phrases were, but it is also possible that he did. Either way, his two-and-a-half-minute-long video raises a number of questions.
Why did Roberts feel compelled to make it? Why did he choose to refer to “the globalist class” and “the venomous coalition”? When he asserted his “loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America,” did he understand that he implicitly raised the question of the loyalty of American Jews?
I asked three political and historical analysts to address these and other questions: Laura K. Field, author of “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” which was published this month; Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons”; and Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The Times Book Review and the Week in Review and the author of “The Death of Conservatism” and a monumental biography of William F. Buckley Jr. All three responded by email.
Roberts, Field wrote, was explicitly hired to run Heritage as part of a concerted drive to shift the conservative institution away from its roots in the Reagan revolution of the 1980s and into alignment with Trump’s MAGA movement.
The ideological radicalization, Field wrote,
has included a blurring of boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable ideas and opinions — a clear shift of the Overton window toward paleoconservatism and the far right.
In the lingo of a place like the Claremont Institute, which became so heavily involved in the events leading up to and including Jan. 6, Kevin Roberts “knows what time it is.”
In a key marker of the ideological transformation of Heritage, “Roberts effectively pledged allegiance to the national conservatism movement (see this speech in Miami in 2022, where he said, ‘I come not to invite the national conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours’).”
In “Furious Minds,” Field wrote:
Ideologically, national conservatism promotes the notion of a single, culturally homogenous nation-state that is under threat from within and without and needs to be protected. This embrace of nationalism — at times an open endorsement of Christian nationalism — is highly exclusive. It cuts against America’s tradition of religious pluralism, as well as against declarationist creedal elements of America’s self-understanding and civil religion.
The mood of national conservatism, Field wrote, “is fervent and unyielding.”
Heilbrunn made similar points but from a different perspective.
“Over the past few years,” Heilbrunn wrote, “Kevin Roberts has steadily repositioned the Heritage Foundation to serve as the ideological advance guard of the MAGA movement, most notably by advancing the Project 2025 manifesto as well as purging a number of the organization’s fellows.”
For Roberts, Heilbrunn argued, “defending Tucker Carlson and, by implication, the odious Nick Fuentes, must have seemed like a no-brainer — another step toward fortifying his MAGA bona fides and allying Heritage with the thunder on the right. Roberts’s real mistake was that he didn’t purge Heritage enough to avoid an internal outcry.”
Tanenhaus, in turn, wrote that Roberts has adopted a warrior-like approach to running a right-wing think tank. He described Roberts’s thinking as:
“Don’t give an inch to woke progressives. The instant they (the left) sense weakness they will attack. Why attack our bad guys when yours are so much worse — woke crusaders for D.E.I., transgender activists, ‘Communists.’ ”
These radical changes on the right are not limited to the leadership of think tanks. In addition, there has been a fundamental shift over the past decade in the composition of the Republican electorate, opening the door to right-wing populism, and then some.
Rod Dreher, a conservative essayist, has emerged as a leading figure on the right warning of the growing strength of neo-Nazism and antisemitism — known in some quarters as Groyperism — among young conservative activists.
“Conservatives in Washington, D.C.,” Dreher wrote in an essay in The Free Press on Wednesday,
have been saying to me that the influence of neo-Nazi Holocaust-denying livestreamer Nick Fuentes has taken off among Gen Z congressional and administration staffers. One older insider put the number of Fuentes fans and fellow travelers, so-called Groypers, in these Washington circles at “30 to 40 percent.”
The Trump administration’s partisan approach to antisemitism is exemplified in the contrast between its willingness to wreak havoc in medical and scientific research at universities and hospitals seen as allies of the Democratic “deep state” while downplaying explicit antisemitism among Republicans, including Trump administration appointees.
During nearly 10 months in office, Trump officials have cut grants totaling at least $4.5 billion to universities and hospitals and collected penalties of at least $330 million, based in large part on allegations that the institutions failed to constrain antisemitism.
Contrast that with the reaction after Politico disclosed on Oct. 14 the explicitly pro-Nazi, anti-Black and anti-Jewish private messages in a Young Republican chat group in “‘I Love Hitler’: Leaked Messages Expose Young Republicans’ Racist Chat.”
The participants, who ranged in age from 24 to 35, Politico reported,
referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
So how did Vice President Vance respond when asked to comment the next day?
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like — that’s what kids do, and I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke, is cause to ruin their lives. And at some point, we’re all going to have to say, enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not OK.
Vance’s answer raised alarm bells among conservative Jews and Christians.
Robert P. George, a professor of political science at Princeton and a leading conservative intellectual, published “Why I Reject ‘No Enemies to the Right’” in National Review. In it, George described,
as the foundational principle of all sound morality: the profound, inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. Everything else I believe about ethics and politics in one way or another stands upon or presupposes that principle. Any form of “conservatism” (or “liberalism”) that denies it in principle or transgresses it in practice is alien to me.
That is why I believe that the conservative movement, though it can and should be a broad tent, simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in the inherent and equal dignity of all.
Without specifically referring to Carlson, Fuentes, Roberts or Vance, George concluded:
Engaging and forcefully arguing against people who deny the inherent and equal dignity of all is one thing. Welcoming them into the movement or treating their ideas and ideologies as representing legitimate forms of conservatism is something entirely different.
On Monday, George announced his resignation from the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees.
Abe Greenwald, the executive editor of Commentary, wrote on Nov. 10:
The central question about the influence of antisemites’ attempted infiltration of the mainstream right is this: What, if anything, is JD Vance going to do about it. Vance, Donald Trump’s most likely heir apparent, is entangled with the Jew-haters, takes pains not to cross their red lines and clearly feels the need to stay in proximity to their camp.
“We don’t know whether Vance’s attitude is pure political strategy or an indication that he sympathizes with this crowd to some degree,” Greenwald pointed out, adding that if Vance “believes the Groypers have a point, then we’ve entered a much darker world.”
To some in the hard-core MAGA wing, the comments coming from George, Greenwald and others are not based on moral belief but a calculated strategy to attack Trump, Trumpism and Vance.
On Thursday, for example, Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, argued in “The Attack on the Heritage Foundation Is an Attack on MAGA”: “The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson. They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great agenda of Donald Trump.”
Kimball quoted a column in The Federalist from Nov. 4 by John Daniel Davidson, who argued: “Genuine concern about antisemitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack JD Vance in hopes of retaking control of the G.O.P.”
“Simply put,” Davidson continued,
the people who lost control of the Republican Party in 2016 want it back, either by ensuring Vance is not the 2028 nominee or that he has to go through a bruising G.O.P. primary before the general election. If they can’t control Vance, they would rather he lose to a Democrat than carry Trump’s MAGA movement and America First policies forward.
Field makes no claim to know what Vance is thinking but, she wrote, the vice president has chosen to not distance
himself from all kinds of extreme and illiberal ideas — ideas about professional women, about immigrants and now about antisemitism.
There is certainly a political logic to his equivocating approach — it allows him to stay on good, or at least neutral, terms with as many people on the right as possible, and so to minimize the extent to which these ugly controversies impact his own popularity within the movement. Alternatively, perhaps he simply agrees with the more extremist and bigoted parts of the MAGA movement. I suspect it is mainly the former — a political calculation. Either way, it is a total failure of moral leadership.
Heilbrunn contended that
Vance has his finger on the pulse of the youthful right. He has long positioned himself as a foe of the neocons who championed the second Iraq war. He belongs to a faction that believes that the mostly Jewish neocons are globalist interlopers who usurped true Republican principles and debauched the G.O.P.
Now he is following the politically correct, as it were, course in refusing to repudiate antisemitism on the right, which has long been a constituent element of the movement. It dates back to the 1930s, when leading figures on the right were not so much isolationist as pro-Nazi — they maintained that America should ally itself with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union rather than with Great Britain.
In this context, Heilbrunn argued,
Vance is helping to return the political right to its true origins after World War I, when it embraced hostility to immigration and cozied up to a variety of foreign dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini. Today Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban are its new heroes. My take: If he rises to power, Vance will make Trump look like milquetoast.
Tanenhaus said:
The logic is clear. Vance is one of two or three very likely successors to President Trump. He also has dual personae. He is both sophisticated political thinker and active politician. He grasps as well as anyone that MAGA today has two identities. In policy terms it involves a series of well-argued beliefs — about history, constitutionalism, the role of religion, the primacy of the traditional (heteronormative) family, the meaning of civic engagement and America’s “common culture.”
MAGA’s second identity, Tanenhaus wrote,
is emotive, impassioned, with a powerful footing in flyover country, the nation’s cultural outskirts and geographical hinterlands where there are substantial votes to be harvested. Vance is a genuine product of that world.
Vance’s future depends on achieving a durable equipoise between these two identities, the thinking man and the foxhole fighter. What to progressives looks like a failure of nerve or moral courage is in reality an opportunity for him to remind the MAGA base, especially its Zoomers, that he is with them, just as he dignifies Trumpism through his intellect.
How is this intraparty conflict likely to play out over time? Clearly, the answer will depend on the Republican choice of a presidential nominee in 2028 and the success or failure of that candidate.
There is, however, one major indication that what is now called the Groyper faction in the Republican Party will remain a force on the right for some years to come: Donald Trump.
Until Sunday, Trump stayed largely silent on the Heritage-Roberts-Carson-Fuentes debate, a silence preceded by his 2017 claim that marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., included some “very fine people” and his repeated willingness to appoint men and women with antisemitic records to public office.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that seeks to find market solutions to social and economic problems, noted in an essay in The Bulwark last Tuesday, that among the conservative critics of Roberts, Carlson and Fuentes,
something critically important is missing from their indictment. These figures conspicuously omit any accounting of the prime force fostering a political climate in which all forms of hatred — very much including antisemitism — President Donald J. Trump.
It was Trump, Schoenfeld pointed out,
who nominated to the post of special counsel of the United States Paul Ingrassia, a man who boasted of having “a Nazi streak” in his character. When Ingrassia’s nomination was headed for certain defeat in the Senate, Trump retained him in his current White House role as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump himself may not be an antisemite, Schoenfeld noted,
but he has been a font of hatred writ large, and a facilitator of vicious antisemites. With the White House imprimatur behind him, he commands a vast audience, with millions of fervent true believers in its ranks. If there has been a normalization of antisemitism in America, it comes in no small part from the very top.
When Trump finally did break his silence over the furor at Heritage, his commentary was telling. “We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview,” he said, before adding:
I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.
In other words, just as he did in the case of the march in Charlottesville, Trump has reaffirmed his adherence to the MAGA principle that there should be no enemies on the right, no matter who they are or what they believe.
The mood of national conservatism, Field wrote, “is fervent and unyielding.”
Heilbrunn made similar points but from a different perspective.
“Over the past few years,” Heilbrunn wrote, “Kevin Roberts has steadily repositioned the Heritage Foundation to serve as the ideological advance guard of the MAGA movement, most notably by advancing the Project 2025 manifesto as well as purging a number of the organization’s fellows.”
For Roberts, Heilbrunn argued, “defending Tucker Carlson and, by implication, the odious Nick Fuentes, must have seemed like a no-brainer — another step toward fortifying his MAGA bona fides and allying Heritage with the thunder on the right. Roberts’s real mistake was that he didn’t purge Heritage enough to avoid an internal outcry.”
Tanenhaus, in turn, wrote that Roberts has adopted a warrior-like approach to running a right-wing think tank. He described Roberts’s thinking as:
“Don’t give an inch to woke progressives. The instant they (the left) sense weakness they will attack. Why attack our bad guys when yours are so much worse — woke crusaders for D.E.I., transgender activists, ‘Communists.’ ”
These radical changes on the right are not limited to the leadership of think tanks. In addition, there has been a fundamental shift over the past decade in the composition of the Republican electorate, opening the door to right-wing populism, and then some.
Rod Dreher, a conservative essayist, has emerged as a leading figure on the right warning of the growing strength of neo-Nazism and antisemitism — known in some quarters as Groyperism — among young conservative activists.
“Conservatives in Washington, D.C.,” Dreher wrote in an essay in The Free Press on Wednesday,
have been saying to me that the influence of neo-Nazi Holocaust-denying livestreamer Nick Fuentes has taken off among Gen Z congressional and administration staffers. One older insider put the number of Fuentes fans and fellow travelers, so-called Groypers, in these Washington circles at “30 to 40 percent.”
The Trump administration’s partisan approach to antisemitism is exemplified in the contrast between its willingness to wreak havoc in medical and scientific research at universities and hospitals seen as allies of the Democratic “deep state” while downplaying explicit antisemitism among Republicans, including Trump administration appointees.
During nearly 10 months in office, Trump officials have cut grants totaling at least $4.5 billion to universities and hospitals and collected penalties of at least $330 million, based in large part on allegations that the institutions failed to constrain antisemitism.
Contrast that with the reaction after Politico disclosed on Oct. 14 the explicitly pro-Nazi, anti-Black and anti-Jewish private messages in a Young Republican chat group in “‘I Love Hitler’: Leaked Messages Expose Young Republicans’ Racist Chat.”
The participants, who ranged in age from 24 to 35, Politico reported,
referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
So how did Vice President Vance respond when asked to comment the next day?
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like — that’s what kids do, and I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke, is cause to ruin their lives. And at some point, we’re all going to have to say, enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not OK.
Vance’s answer raised alarm bells among conservative Jews and Christians.
Robert P. George, a professor of political science at Princeton and a leading conservative intellectual, published “Why I Reject ‘No Enemies to the Right’” in National Review. In it, George described,
as the foundational principle of all sound morality: the profound, inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. Everything else I believe about ethics and politics in one way or another stands upon or presupposes that principle. Any form of “conservatism” (or “liberalism”) that denies it in principle or transgresses it in practice is alien to me.
That is why I believe that the conservative movement, though it can and should be a broad tent, simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in the inherent and equal dignity of all.
Without specifically referring to Carlson, Fuentes, Roberts or Vance, George concluded:
Engaging and forcefully arguing against people who deny the inherent and equal dignity of all is one thing. Welcoming them into the movement or treating their ideas and ideologies as representing legitimate forms of conservatism is something entirely different.
On Monday, George announced his resignation from the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees.
Abe Greenwald, the executive editor of Commentary, wrote on Nov. 10:
The central question about the influence of antisemites’ attempted infiltration of the mainstream right is this: What, if anything, is JD Vance going to do about it. Vance, Donald Trump’s most likely heir apparent, is entangled with the Jew-haters, takes pains not to cross their red lines and clearly feels the need to stay in proximity to their camp.
“We don’t know whether Vance’s attitude is pure political strategy or an indication that he sympathizes with this crowd to some degree,” Greenwald pointed out, adding that if Vance “believes the Groypers have a point, then we’ve entered a much darker world.”
To some in the hard-core MAGA wing, the comments coming from George, Greenwald and others are not based on moral belief but a calculated strategy to attack Trump, Trumpism and Vance.
On Thursday, for example, Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, argued in “The Attack on the Heritage Foundation Is an Attack on MAGA”: “The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson. They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great agenda of Donald Trump.”
Kimball quoted a column in The Federalist from Nov. 4 by John Daniel Davidson, who argued: “Genuine concern about antisemitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack JD Vance in hopes of retaking control of the G.O.P.”
“Simply put,” Davidson continued,
the people who lost control of the Republican Party in 2016 want it back, either by ensuring Vance is not the 2028 nominee or that he has to go through a bruising G.O.P. primary before the general election. If they can’t control Vance, they would rather he lose to a Democrat than carry Trump’s MAGA movement and America First policies forward.
Field makes no claim to know what Vance is thinking but, she wrote, the vice president has chosen to not distance
himself from all kinds of extreme and illiberal ideas — ideas about professional women, about immigrants and now about antisemitism.
There is certainly a political logic to his equivocating approach — it allows him to stay on good, or at least neutral, terms with as many people on the right as possible, and so to minimize the extent to which these ugly controversies impact his own popularity within the movement. Alternatively, perhaps he simply agrees with the more extremist and bigoted parts of the MAGA movement. I suspect it is mainly the former — a political calculation. Either way, it is a total failure of moral leadership.
Heilbrunn contended that
Vance has his finger on the pulse of the youthful right. He has long positioned himself as a foe of the neocons who championed the second Iraq war. He belongs to a faction that believes that the mostly Jewish neocons are globalist interlopers who usurped true Republican principles and debauched the G.O.P.
Now he is following the politically correct, as it were, course in refusing to repudiate antisemitism on the right, which has long been a constituent element of the movement. It dates back to the 1930s, when leading figures on the right were not so much isolationist as pro-Nazi — they maintained that America should ally itself with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union rather than with Great Britain.
In this context, Heilbrunn argued,
Vance is helping to return the political right to its true origins after World War I, when it embraced hostility to immigration and cozied up to a variety of foreign dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini. Today Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban are its new heroes. My take: If he rises to power, Vance will make Trump look like milquetoast.
Tanenhaus said:
The logic is clear. Vance is one of two or three very likely successors to President Trump. He also has dual personae. He is both sophisticated political thinker and active politician. He grasps as well as anyone that MAGA today has two identities. In policy terms it involves a series of well-argued beliefs — about history, constitutionalism, the role of religion, the primacy of the traditional (heteronormative) family, the meaning of civic engagement and America’s “common culture.”
MAGA’s second identity, Tanenhaus wrote,
is emotive, impassioned, with a powerful footing in flyover country, the nation’s cultural outskirts and geographical hinterlands where there are substantial votes to be harvested. Vance is a genuine product of that world.
Vance’s future depends on achieving a durable equipoise between these two identities, the thinking man and the foxhole fighter. What to progressives looks like a failure of nerve or moral courage is in reality an opportunity for him to remind the MAGA base, especially its Zoomers, that he is with them, just as he dignifies Trumpism through his intellect.
How is this intraparty conflict likely to play out over time? Clearly, the answer will depend on the Republican choice of a presidential nominee in 2028 and the success or failure of that candidate.
There is, however, one major indication that what is now called the Groyper faction in the Republican Party will remain a force on the right for some years to come: Donald Trump.
Until Sunday, Trump stayed largely silent on the Heritage-Roberts-Carson-Fuentes debate, a silence preceded by his 2017 claim that marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., included some “very fine people” and his repeated willingness to appoint men and women with antisemitic records to public office.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that seeks to find market solutions to social and economic problems, noted in an essay in The Bulwark last Tuesday, that among the conservative critics of Roberts, Carlson and Fuentes,
something critically important is missing from their indictment. These figures conspicuously omit any accounting of the prime force fostering a political climate in which all forms of hatred — very much including antisemitism — President Donald J. Trump.
It was Trump, Schoenfeld pointed out,
who nominated to the post of special counsel of the United States Paul Ingrassia, a man who boasted of having “a Nazi streak” in his character. When Ingrassia’s nomination was headed for certain defeat in the Senate, Trump retained him in his current White House role as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump himself may not be an antisemite, Schoenfeld noted,
but he has been a font of hatred writ large, and a facilitator of vicious antisemites. With the White House imprimatur behind him, he commands a vast audience, with millions of fervent true believers in its ranks. If there has been a normalization of antisemitism in America, it comes in no small part from the very top.
When Trump finally did break his silence over the furor at Heritage, his commentary was telling. “We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview,” he said, before adding:
I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.
In other words, just as he did in the case of the march in Charlottesville, Trump has reaffirmed his adherence to the MAGA principle that there should be no enemies on the right, no matter who they are or what they believe.
More on the Groypers and the Republican Party:
Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
JD Vance Is Idling at the Edges of American Politics
Nov. 15, 2025
Opinion | Ezra Klein and Jack McCordick
The ‘Groyperfication’ of the G.O.P.
Nov. 14, 2025
Opinion | David French
Cruelty, Bigotry and Rage. What’s Not to Like?
Nov. 9, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/opinion/epstein-trump-gop-fuentes.html
Opinion
The Opinions
Has Epstein Stained Trump for Good?
In the Epstein saga, Trump is his own worst enemy.
November 15, 2025
New York Times
by Jamelle Bouie Michelle Cottle and David French
Produced by Derek Arthur
VIDEO:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010524967/in-the-epstein-saga-trump-is-his-own-worst-enemy.html
Is this the beginning of the end for Trump and his MAGA base?
The release of thousands of pages of emails from Jeffrey Epstein has cast a spotlight back on President Trump and his relationship with Epstein. This week, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle and the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French argue that MAGA’s engagement with figures like Epstein and the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes is causing cracks on the political right and gradual losses for Trump’s base. But will these incremental steps away from Trump eventually look more like a stampede?
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for Times Opinion. And I’m back this week with my usual partners in crime, the fabulous columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French. Guys, how are you doing?
In the Epstein Saga, Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy
Is this the beginning of the end for Trump and his MAGA base?
David French: Doing well, Michelle.
Jamelle Bouie: Doing OK.
Cottle: That’s not very convincing, Jamelle. Why only OK? Do I want to know? Or are we going to come back to that?
Bouie: I’m just tired of being in hotel rooms, as viewers may have noticed.
Cottle: Oh, you’re the hardest working man in Opinion.
This week, I feel that we need to dig in once again to the Epstein files — 23,000 of them. I assume that both of you have read them all, every single word.
French: I’ve read as much as I can stomach. Let me put it that way, Michelle.
Cottle: I have to say I found the whole thing completely vomitous, but I mean, bottom line, it sure seems like President Trump knew a little bit more about Mr. Epstein’s predation than he had previously acknowledged. Just saying.
Bouie: That honestly seems like a bit of an understatement. By his own account and by Epstein’s own account, they were close friends for over a decade, and it seems like every single bit of circumstantial evidence we get access to — I’ll put it this way, nothing has ever emerged to suggest that Trump didn’t know at the very least what was going on. Nothing.
Everything that’s ever emerged relating to this suggests quite strongly that Trump was very aware of what was going on and may have even participated.
Cottle: Oh! Ah! OK!
Bouie: That’s where the evidence falls. Not so much ——
Cottle: That’s a visual I just — I can’t handle, Jamelle.
Bouie: Not so much anything exonerative. And these emails are just another example of that.
Cottle: We’re taping on Thursday morning, so as always, things may change by the time you hear this, but give me your basic reaction, David.
French: Yeah, I would say this just advances an already terrible story incrementally in the more terrible direction. Let’s put this in a larger context: You’ve had a situation where we’ve had reporting about Donald Trump and the birthday greeting where he allegedly drew the outline of a naked woman around a poem, and what was very obvious — like the content of the text there — it was very obvious that if that was from Trump, that Trump was signaling that he knew exactly all that was going on.
And then you have the transfer of Ghislaine Maxwell to far more favorable accommodations, reporting that she is now experiencing even favorable accommodations within the context of the more favorable accommodations, getting special favors, even at this new prison. Then we get emails that indicate that Trump may have spent many hours alone with a victim. Now, Republicans pushed back on that and said that this victim who’s a known person in the Epstein story and who passed away not long ago, that she had said that Trump had never done anything inappropriate.
But once again, we had more evidence of a connection to Epstein and Trump. More evidence that Trump seems to have known that, as Jamelle was saying, at the very least, Trump seems to have known a lot about what was going on. So it turns out that Donald Trump is not — big surprise — some sort of avenging angel against sexual misconduct. No, it turns out that all of the available evidence indicates that Donald Trump, when it comes to sex, is a really depraved man. He’s a really depraved man and he is not ——
Cottle: I’m shocked — shocked.
French: He is not, MAGA, your warrior against sexual misconduct and abuse.
All of this stuff is very incremental. None of it is dam-bursting kind of stuff, but it’s all incrementally terrible for Donald Trump and very critically, it’s also incrementally terrible for the MAGA movement going forward.
Cottle: Jamelle, did you have deep thoughts on this?
Bouie: I’m not sure I have any thoughts deeper than what David put forth. I guess I would just observe that in addition to the way the emails further implicate Trump or further suggest the degree of Trump’s implication, to be precise about it, I was just struck going through some of them. What I’ve read and heard about Jeffrey Epstein is that he was this remarkably charming and intelligent guy. And then you read these emails and frankly, he sounds like an idiot. He writes in this half-literate style. Nothing he says is particularly perceptive.
And one thing I was struck by is the extent to which, with these very wealthy, very powerful people, you always hear that they’re so charming. I think it’s that people want to be charmed by someone with wealth and with power and with access to things that they might want. I think that’s true for Epstein. I think it’s true for Trump. One of the useful things about a glimpse into maybe more intimate communications is, it allows you to see how much these people aren’t particularly remarkable, that the only thing that really distinguishes them is that they have money and power.
Cottle: So David, as you noted, this is not the first piece of alleged evidence we’ve seen of Trump’s sexual degeneracy. I mean, we’ve had the “Access Hollywood” tapes going way back, the alleged birthday card for Epstein, multiple allegations by women of his bad behavior. But nothing seems to stick, or at least stick in any way that actually has repercussions for him. So what would it take for this time to be different? Is it just the accretion, or would there have to be something earth shattering?
French: I don’t see that there is anything but incremental losses for Trump.
I think if you look back at everything that you walked through, from the “Access Hollywood” tapes to the E. Jean Carroll situation, to the Epstein revelation so far, to the Ghislaine Maxwell transfer. Pile that on top of Jan. 6; pile that on top of all of the other Trump stuff; and you really realize that — look, everyone who’s sitting there saying, what is the thing? There is no single thing. There are a number of things.
But one thing that seems very clear to me right now is what we have is a one-way ratchet that is moving against Trump in the arena of public support. That everything right now is causing Trump to shed support. And then what’s more dramatic, though, is what’s happening the layer below Trump. That’s where you’re actually seeing dramatic activity. You’re seeing dramatic conflict within the Republican world — that one layer below Trump. Trump is still largely untouchable, but any layer below Trump, and people are willing to rip each other to shreds. And that is the dynamic that is taking place. MAGA below Trump is cracking apart, and so that to me is what’s the actual story of what’s happening right now.
Cottle: Well, I don’t know — it may just be me, but I mean, have you guys noticed the president and his people still seem to be on track to do everything possible to make themselves look more guilty? So this week a new Democratic congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva, was finally sworn in after weeks of delay, and there had been all this grumbling about how she’s long vowed to provide the final necessary signature on a petition to force a House vote on whether to compel the Trump administration to release its Epstein files, which, of course, it was promising to get to the bottom of this for its people long ago, from Day 1. But you know, that’s changed.
So as Grijalva is finally being sworn in, there’s this news that Trump is now putting the screws to Lauren Boebert, one of the few House Republicans who has been willing to do the right thing in this regard and sign on with the transparency group. But the minute it looks like they might have the momentum to get this moving again and force some revelations, Trump jumps in and is squeezing people, which, I don’t know how you can look more guilty. It’s like they’re handling this as poorly as possible.
Is there a logic to this other than they just don’t want people to know what’s in there? I mean, what the hell?
Bouie: I think the logic to this, such that it is — and this goes back to something David said earlier — is that they, Trump specifically, but the people around him, do not know how to engage in politics in any way other than sort of being superaggressive going on the attack and escalating. They don’t know how to do anything else. No other thing seems to occur to them. This is their only mode of operation. We were going to try to use as much force as we can to beat you into submission. And when that doesn’t work, they’re left adrift.
And one thing I want to strongly emphasize is that looking ahead to the next year, the only way things will get better for the administration is if they can somehow recover, switch gears, change course. Whatever you want to use as your metaphor here. And there’s no evidence that they’re capable of doing that. I’m sure they might want to on some level. Like someone who might be addicted to eating ice cream might want to stop, but they don’t.
Cottle: Don’t talk about me like that.
Bouie: But they don’t have the capability to do anything different. And so one assumption I’m operating from is that this right now might be the high-water mark at this point of Trump’s stature with the public. I don’t see it going up in any meaningful sense. I think it’s going to continue to go down because there’s mismanagement of the federal government.
There’s the material stuff, and then there’s the fact, as you point out, Michelle, that whenever any kind of scandal comes up, they seem to make themselves look red-handed. Like taking Lauren Boebert into the Situation Room and trying to put the screws on her just doesn’t make her ——
French: So weird.
Bouie: Look guilty. It makes it look like you have published a book titled “If I Did It.” Right? It puts you into late-period O.J. territory. So I don’t really understand how things are ever going to get better for them.
French: I think that that’s right. I will say, obviously there are events that can occur. Here’s a wild card: One of the things that could actually end up helping Trump quite a bit is that the Supreme Court strikes down his tariffs. Because right now that Trump policy is a huge drag on the economy. So I think if the Supreme Court reverses the tariffs, you might actually see a burst of economic activity and optimism that would be in spite of Trump, not because of Trump. But that is because presidents always benefit from a positive economic development. So I could see that there are events in the future that I could imagine helping Trump. What I cannot see helping Trump is Trump. Who I cannot see helping Trump is MAGA.
Cottle: That’s what I want to get at next, which is that it looks like there is a House vote on the Epstein files. This is going to force Republican lawmakers to make a very uncomfortable choice between supporting their constituents who want transparency and not going against Donald Trump, who does not want these files released. What do they do, David? How do you expect them to navigate this line? And then Jamelle, you after.
French: You’ll see a few peel off — a few more, in addition, I think, to Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie and some of the others who have pushed forward on this.
Cottle: Marjorie Taylor Greene — I have to throw that in. Every time.
French: And you’re going to see a few more peel off because there’s this kind of calculus going on right now, and that calculus is: We know that there is going to be a point in which Donald Trump is a lame duck, and we’re going to have a point where Donald Trump is an anchor on me and my career.
Cottle: Yeah. Me, me, what about me?
French: People are going to be starting to make these kinds of determinations at an increasing rate with every month that passes and we get closer and closer to the end of Trump’s term. And also maybe even closer and closer to the midterms. Because for all of the bluster you saw online about, “Oh, big deal, Democrats won in blue states,” there actually is alarm about what happened on Election Day. And so I think you’re going to see, again, I hate to keep using this word, it’s a broken record: incremental. It’s just going to be incremental.
Bouie: I think that’s about right. There’s not going to be a flood of Republicans fleeing Trump. What there will be are small calculations here and there, willingness to say, “I don’t think I’m going to support this.” I think if this bill to force the White House to release the Epstein files passes the House, I would expect there to be a good deal of pressure on Senate Republicans, and I would expect some of the Senate Republicans to look around the environment and say: “Better to just support this than not.”
The sense that Trump is a lame duck, I think, is growing. I think the shutdown contributed to it quite a bit not simply because it went so long, but because he clearly wasn’t showing any particular leadership during it. There was no indication that he was even capable of resolving it. The fact that there’s no legislation ——
Cottle: And that he just didn’t care.
Bouie: Yeah.
Cottle: That surprised even me.
Bouie: The fact that there’s not really any legislation on the horizon. Is there a Trump bill for anything that anyone sees happening over the next year? No. There’s no particular legislative program. And then he’s becoming more unpopular. So I would suspect that — and I will say not just more unpopular with the public at large, but among Republicans, he’s not in the 80s anymore, 90 percent level. He’s kind of hovering between high 70s, low 80s, which for him is not great.
So I think as Republicans in Congress begin to pick up on what is actually happening in the public, they’re going to, like David says, take incremental steps away from him. But a lot of incremental steps all of a sudden looks like a stampede.
Cottle: Yeah. Yeah.
Bouie: It’s not going to look like a stampede over a course of a month or two months, but we may look back and see quite clearly the movement.
Cottle: OK, so I want to run by both of you something that our colleague Bret Stephens wrote this week about the Epstein mess. He was saying that “the only way any of this sticks politically is a smoking gun, red letter evidence that Trump had a sexual relationship with one of Epstein’s victims. Otherwise, it doesn’t do much but provide fodder for a few manic hours on MSNBC. Democrats need to focus a lot less on Epstein and start worrying a lot more about winning over normal voters with better ideas about governance.”
Agree, disagree? I have thoughts. Go ahead.
Bouie: I disagree with that for two reasons. First is a low-level one. The first one is when you just ask voters: “Do you care about this? What do you think about this?” The answers are, yes, I care about this. I think it’s very troubling. And when you have like two-thirds of American voters consistently saying in surveys that this is something that troubles me, I want to know more about it, it seems to me to be political malpractice to sort of leave it alone.
The other thing related to that is the way modern American scandals work; in fact, it’s not one big revelation that hurts the most. It’s small revelations over time that hurt the most. And so just thinking politically — being amateur political strategists, which I think we should strongly discourage people in our business from doing that — but if we’re going to do it, being an amateur political strategist here, the best thing to do is just to keep it going. Like have it be a thing that he’s asking about constantly. That’s the smart play.
But the other thing is, I think Bret’s analysis misses the symbolic aspect of this stuff. The broad public — and we see this with all these sorts of political insurgencies happening in both parties — are extremely distrustful of the establishment. They’re extremely distrustful of normal politics, of institutional politics. And here we have in the Epstein scandal this example of corruption among the highest reaches of the American political and cultural and economic establishment. Major figures palling around with this guy; politicians palling around with this guy.
And so if voters are telling you in their actions that what they want is some kind of visible representation of you breaking with the way things are normally done, then here is this scandal, which gives you an opportunity to performatively break with the things that are normally done. And it’s breaking with how things are normally done that is going to open the pathway, I think, for voters listening to your other ideas. You show that you’re not just another politician, and then they listen to what you have to say. And so I think, with all respect to Bret, I think his analysis here kind of misses a couple steps and doesn’t take seriously what the voters themselves are saying and signaling in their actions and behavior.
French: So I think of it as short term, long term. I think in the short term it is — Jamelle’s exactly correct that it would be in many ways, I think, political malpractice for Democrats not to focus on this because voters do actually care about it. It’s a target-rich environment, let’s just put it that way. The record is full of people like Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, JD Vance and others saying: We’re going to get to the bottom of Epstein.
And then also there’s this other thing that this is about the only scandal in the Trump era where he’s engaging in that classic political dissembling that makes voters’ antennae go up. Like, is there something real here? Because the other way that he’s dealt with scandal in the past in his administration is just to do it, right out in the public.
I wrote about this. He pardons a guy whose company helped pump up the value of Trump crypto, and he just does it. Or he just releases the memo about trying to extort a political investigation out of Zelensky. He just puts it all out there, and it really confuses voters because they’re not used to politicians just dumping their scandal out on the public and just saying: Here it is. But this is classic political scandal conduct — hiding the ball, working very hard to keep things concealed. And all of that broadcasts to the public that there’s something bad here. And so I think it’d be malpractice for the Democrats not to lean into that in the short term.
But if all you do is win because the other side is bad, then what we’re doing is we’re trapping ourselves more and more into the cycle we’ve been through for the past 20 years, which is: Republicans win. They govern in a way that the public doesn’t like. So voters turn to the opposing party because that’s the only alternative. Then Democrats win, and then very quickly the voters turn to the opposing party, and then we’ve just been doing this every two to four to six years, for 20 years now.
So it is absolutely true that if a party wants to break this logjam for anything more than one election cycle or two election cycles, you do need long-term popular, stable governance, which involves a popular governing agenda that actually works in people’s lives. So you have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Cottle: Yeah, I think that the idea that you can just run against Trump indefinitely is — obviously — you know, look at where we are. That’s what the party tried in 2024 and we wound back up in this pickle. Although I do agree with the point, I think it’s hard to overstate how much voters respond to that kind of “ugh” level scandal.
You can talk about democratic norms and the approaching autocracy and good governance all you want to, and they’ll be like: “Yes, yes. We believe in that.” That’s not what really sets them on fire, though. Something like this is the sexual predator version of taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing, which we’ve all enjoyed the public response to that.
Bouie: Michelle, that actually gets at a thought I just had, which is that I think one of the reasons that people in our business should not be amateur political strategists is that we think in terms of words and messages, but voters think in terms of images.
Cottle: Thank you, yes.
Bouie: That’s what lands with people: images. And so the East Wing is more — you ask a wordsmith, do you think people are going to care about the East Wing? They’ll say, I don’t know so much, but people actually do care about it because it’s a striking and dramatic image, and it represents something on a very visceral level about how they feel about what’s happening in the world.
In the same way, Epstein is primarily about images. Images of this guy with powerful people, images of this guy with teenage girls. These images are quite powerful, and so I think the task for Democrats politically is to be able to conjure up compelling images — compelling images to tar their opponent in. Talking about democracy doesn’t do that, but this might. And then images that demonstrate a commitment to building a better world. For me, dismissing something as vivid as the Epstein scandal, as a political tool ——
Cottle: There’s a good word for it.
Bouie: It does feel like malpractice.
Cottle: Yeah, the press conference the House did with victims of Epstein, I think, caught a lot of people’s attention for exactly that reason. You had actual faces to put to some of this.
But shifting to another set of images, since we’re talking about the potential coming crackup of the Trump coalition, which I know, David, is one of your favorite topics. You’ve also been following the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes saga, which shifts us from sexual predators to groypers. What is the story for those who are out of the loop and how does it fit in with the broader topic?
French: So, let’s talk about both individuals. A lot of listeners will be familiar with Tucker Carlson. They may not be familiar with the turns Tucker Carlson has taken since he’s left Fox News. When he was at Fox, he was a conspiracy theorist. He hasn’t just doubled down on it. He’s quintupled down on that since he’s left Fox News.
He has trafficked in all kinds of antisemitic tropes over the last several years. He’s dived into the 9/11 conspiracy theories. He has given softball interviews to Vladimir Putin. And through all of that, he is, by some measures, a very popular podcaster on the right. He then invited a guy named Nick Fuentes on, and a lot of listeners may not be familiar with this guy because he’s not somebody who you’re going to see on television. But he’s a very popular Nazi-sympathizing fan of Adolf Hitler. And when I say all of that ——
Cottle: Does that go on his business card? Oh, my God.
French: When I say all of that, you’re thinking: Wait, what? An actual fan of Adolf Hitler? And he’s popular? Yes. I mean, this is a guy who will say things like Team Hitler. He’s a guy who has denied the Holocaust. We’re not talking about dog-whistle antisemitism from this guy. It’s bullhorn antisemitism. And he’s built a big following. He’s got about half a million followers on this video platform called Rumble.
So Tucker Carlson has him on his podcast for what can only be described as just an incredibly softball interview. And for whatever reason, this blew up on the right, and it created some real anger, especially online. Then the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most prominent sort of think tank in the MAGA universe, came forward. And the president of the Heritage Foundation condemned the “venomous coalition” critiquing Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
Unbelievable stuff. This led to a staff revolt at Heritage. It has led to a giant fight on the right over the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes interview, where you’re really clearly seeing the different factions emerge. And it’s also ——
Cottle: The pro-Nazis versus anti-Nazis?
French: Or let’s say, just say Nazi-curious versus not. And Rod Dreher wrote that about 30 to 40 percent of Republican male staffers on the Hill are what you would call groypers. And what is a groyper? They are people who follow Nick Fuentes. You’re not going to encounter many of them in the offline world. You’re not going to encounter many of them in the real world. You know where you’re going to encounter them a lot? In the ranks of young MAGA Republicans. And so all of this is spilling out now into the open, and it’s causing an enormous fight within the right.
And you can sort of see Tucker Carlson as the avatar for one side of it; and then Ben Shapiro on the very, very, very definite anti-Nazi side of it. So you’re literally seeing people viciously attacking Ben Shapiro. Why? Because Ben Shapiro has mounted his horse and is righteously taking on Nazi sympathizers in the Republican coalition and he’s getting massive blowback about it, which is shocking. It is shocking when you think about it.
Bouie: So, I don’t find it that shocking because this has been — I mean, the groyperization of the Republican staffer class, you might say, the young men who are entering into Republican politics — has been an ongoing thing for a couple years.
Back in 2017, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right incident, a writer, Alex Pareene, wrote a piece saying that is the future of the Republican Party. That what we saw there, those young men are the future of the Republican Party. And he was right. This thing has been happening for almost a decade now, and now I’d say it’s almost a little too late to push back. So, of course, he’s getting into ferocious pushback because it’s almost like a fait accompli at this point. It’s happened. You scroll the feeds of the Department of Homeland Security and what you see are like explicit allusions to Nazi propaganda.
The vice president of the United States, JD Vance, pals around with people like Curtis Yarvin, who although does not identify as a neo-Nazi, has sort of like, you might say, Nazi-adjacent ideology about the domination of subhuman peoples. This is just part of the firmament of a good deal of professional Republican politics right now. And I don’t know what to do about it. But the rise of Fuentes as a player could be seen coming a mile away, and it’s so clearly been percolating.
French: Jamelle’s so right here. I mean, I was jumping up and down about this more than 10 years ago because more than 10 years ago, the alt-right emerged from the shadows, directly attacked my family in the most vicious and brutal ways you can possibly imagine. One of the reasons why I’m no longer a Republican, and one of the reasons why I very quickly became no longer welcome in a lot of conservative circles, is because I was calling this stuff out. They were saying: Shut up. The real enemy is Hillary Clinton. The real enemy is the Democrats. And so they were allowing into the tent anyone who would train their fire on the Democrats, and they were shoving away outside of the tent, anyone who was saying: We’ve got a problem on the right.
All of these things together started to pull some of the worst figures in American politics, including neo-Nazis, right into this broader right-wing tent.
Cottle: This all feels to me a little bit like what we’ve watched with the Trump movement from the very beginning, whereas these people make these accommodations in part because they think they can manipulate or control or make use of the extreme elements in their party, but not get swallowed up by them.
But then you turn around and next thing you know, you’re in Congress and trying to decide if you are going to vote in a way that makes you look like you’re covering up child sexual predation. It’s like once you go down this road and start accepting stuff that you could never have imagined embracing before, on the assumption that you can control it, you’re just asking for a whole lot of trouble. Sorry.
Bouie: I would go even further and say that being put in a situation where you may have to vote to cover up child sexual abuse is not just a hazard, but I’d say like the inevitable result of this. The kinds of politics we’re describing are politics that are built on exploitation and domination and hierarchy and the destruction of other people.
And historically speaking, that stuff has always been tied up in the worst kinds of abuse of other human beings, not just in an organized state-centered way, but also in a direct and quite personal way. So my knowledge base is American history and history of the 19th century, and we have loads of evidence attesting to pervasive child sexual abuse in the slaveholding South.
That was the whole thing, and those people produced ideologies that on the surface were all about order and organic community and such. But when it came down to brass tacks, they were just elaborate justifications for dominating other people in the most disgusting and exploitative ways. I see the same exact patterns with these modern-day neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi sympathizers, and all of these people — it’s the same thing. There’s a direct line from disparaging the Declaration of Independence, which our vice president has done, and engaging in apology for really awful behavior and really awful conduct and really awful ways of relating to people.
French: Let me put it this way: People were more angry at me for calling attention to the fact that neo-Nazis had photoshopped pictures of my then 7-year-old daughter into gas chambers with Donald Trump in an SS uniform pressing the button to kill her. They were more upset that I was calling attention to that fact than they were that that happened. Why? Because they didn’t want me to undermine the sense of solidarity against Hillary Clinton.
And if that is the dynamic, if that is the moral calculus here, then everything that has happened since was almost inevitable at this point. Because once you have said: I’m going to accommodate neo-Nazi expression for the greater good of taking down a mainstream Democrat, then you’ve lost your way. You have absolutely lost your way. And here we are.
Cottle: I’m comfortable taking a hard anti-Nazi, pro-David French stance. I’m just going to come right out there and say it.
French: Thank you, Michelle. I appreciate that.
Cottle: I’m with you, David.
OK, so let’s turn this after that dark discussion. Let’s turn this to some recommendations. What do you got for me, guys? And I don’t want to hear anything about Nazis.
Bouie: That was a very, very, very smooth transition.
French: I love that transition. That was pro-right there.
Cottle: Work with me, people!
Bouie: How about you go first, David.
French: OK. This is easy. This is the easiest recommendation week ever. One word: “Pluribus.” It’s by the creator Vince Gilligan of “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad,” starring Rhea Seehorn, who is Kim Wexler in ——
Cottle: Love her.
French: In “Better Call Saul.” It’s one of these shows that really was wrapped up in a lot of secrecy. So all I’m going to say is, in the opening three minutes, you discover that there is a beam being emitted from about 600 light-years away and it has a message in it, obviously coming from an alien intelligence. And then — just watch it. It’s so phenomenal. It’s just great. I’m so excited. I’m just vaguely mad that it’s coming out once per week and you can’t binge it.
Cottle: I need to binge. I really resent the nonbingeable things. What do you got for me?
Bouie: I have a movie. So, listeners and viewers may know that I buy lots of physical media. I have a big Blu-ray collection, and recently, a couple months ago, I bought a new release of the 1992 film “Sneakers,” directed by Phil Alden Robinson and starring the most stacked cast you can imagine — starring Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Mary McDonald, River Phoenix and David Strathairn.
It’s about two former hackers who all go separate ways and they get embroiled in a grand conspiracy. It’s kind of an obscure movie — rarely makes it onto a list of things to see from the ’90s. But I think if you could imagine a movie version of a big warm bowl of chicken soup, this is what this movie is. It’s so fun and comforting and I highly recommend checking it out. It also looks incredible. It’s a very good-looking movie.
Cottle: Well, it’s got Robert Redford, so ——
Bouie: Yeah, it does have Robert Redford.
Cottle: By definition, it’s good looking. That sounds perfect for my holiday viewing if I’m going into that comfort mode.
Bouie: It’s a good Thanksgiving Day movie. Actually, it’s a perfect Thanksgiving Day movie. I’m usually the one doing the cooking. So if I’m in the kitchen and there’s something on the TV, you can put “Sneakers” on the TV and people will enjoy it.
Cottle: Ah, perfect. OK, well, I’m going with a kind of nebulous recommendation, which is that I’m recommending people get out there and organize a group outing that gets their friends out of their comfort zone. What brought this up is that come Friday, I am rallying a group of about a half-dozen women to go take a line-dancing and two-stepping class. I like to dance.
It is hard to find line dancing in Washington, D.C. I have rallied the troops. I like to do this all the time. Over the years I’ve rallied people to go skeet shooting, karaoke — all kinds of things. Salsa dancing, that sort of thing. And it’s always something that your friends are like, eh, really? But then they have a great time.
French: So anytime I hear the word dancing, Michelle, or that anyone’s going dancing, my inner eighth-grade self comes out, which means in real life, I would stand on the edge of the room affirmatively not dancing. And in the virtual life of a conversation means I shuffle to the edge of that conversation.
Bouie: I would go dancing. I think it’s fun.
Cottle: Would you?
Bouie: Yeah.
Cottle: Well, if you drive back up Friday, Jamelle, you’re welcome to join us. I’m very much looking forward to it. And if it goes well, this could just be what I do on Fridays. I’m just saying.
All right, guys, I think that’s it. If you do anything over the weekend out of your comfort zone, I expect you to report back to me. OK?
Bouie: All right.
French: Will do.
Cottle: Guys, thanks so much. Let’s do it again next week.
French: Thanks, Michelle.
Bouie: Looking forward to it.
I
Credit: Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator.
Is this the beginning of the end for Trump and his MAGA base?
The release of thousands of pages of emails from Jeffrey Epstein has cast a spotlight back on President Trump and his relationship with Epstein. This week, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle and the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French argue that MAGA’s engagement with figures like Epstein and the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes is causing cracks on the political right and gradual losses for Trump’s base. But will these incremental steps away from Trump eventually look more like a stampede?
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for Times Opinion. And I’m back this week with my usual partners in crime, the fabulous columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French. Guys, how are you doing?
In the Epstein Saga, Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy
Is this the beginning of the end for Trump and his MAGA base?
David French: Doing well, Michelle.
Jamelle Bouie: Doing OK.
Cottle: That’s not very convincing, Jamelle. Why only OK? Do I want to know? Or are we going to come back to that?
Bouie: I’m just tired of being in hotel rooms, as viewers may have noticed.
Cottle: Oh, you’re the hardest working man in Opinion.
This week, I feel that we need to dig in once again to the Epstein files — 23,000 of them. I assume that both of you have read them all, every single word.
French: I’ve read as much as I can stomach. Let me put it that way, Michelle.
Cottle: I have to say I found the whole thing completely vomitous, but I mean, bottom line, it sure seems like President Trump knew a little bit more about Mr. Epstein’s predation than he had previously acknowledged. Just saying.
Bouie: That honestly seems like a bit of an understatement. By his own account and by Epstein’s own account, they were close friends for over a decade, and it seems like every single bit of circumstantial evidence we get access to — I’ll put it this way, nothing has ever emerged to suggest that Trump didn’t know at the very least what was going on. Nothing.
Everything that’s ever emerged relating to this suggests quite strongly that Trump was very aware of what was going on and may have even participated.
Cottle: Oh! Ah! OK!
Bouie: That’s where the evidence falls. Not so much ——
Cottle: That’s a visual I just — I can’t handle, Jamelle.
Bouie: Not so much anything exonerative. And these emails are just another example of that.
Cottle: We’re taping on Thursday morning, so as always, things may change by the time you hear this, but give me your basic reaction, David.
French: Yeah, I would say this just advances an already terrible story incrementally in the more terrible direction. Let’s put this in a larger context: You’ve had a situation where we’ve had reporting about Donald Trump and the birthday greeting where he allegedly drew the outline of a naked woman around a poem, and what was very obvious — like the content of the text there — it was very obvious that if that was from Trump, that Trump was signaling that he knew exactly all that was going on.
And then you have the transfer of Ghislaine Maxwell to far more favorable accommodations, reporting that she is now experiencing even favorable accommodations within the context of the more favorable accommodations, getting special favors, even at this new prison. Then we get emails that indicate that Trump may have spent many hours alone with a victim. Now, Republicans pushed back on that and said that this victim who’s a known person in the Epstein story and who passed away not long ago, that she had said that Trump had never done anything inappropriate.
But once again, we had more evidence of a connection to Epstein and Trump. More evidence that Trump seems to have known that, as Jamelle was saying, at the very least, Trump seems to have known a lot about what was going on. So it turns out that Donald Trump is not — big surprise — some sort of avenging angel against sexual misconduct. No, it turns out that all of the available evidence indicates that Donald Trump, when it comes to sex, is a really depraved man. He’s a really depraved man and he is not ——
Cottle: I’m shocked — shocked.
French: He is not, MAGA, your warrior against sexual misconduct and abuse.
All of this stuff is very incremental. None of it is dam-bursting kind of stuff, but it’s all incrementally terrible for Donald Trump and very critically, it’s also incrementally terrible for the MAGA movement going forward.
Cottle: Jamelle, did you have deep thoughts on this?
Bouie: I’m not sure I have any thoughts deeper than what David put forth. I guess I would just observe that in addition to the way the emails further implicate Trump or further suggest the degree of Trump’s implication, to be precise about it, I was just struck going through some of them. What I’ve read and heard about Jeffrey Epstein is that he was this remarkably charming and intelligent guy. And then you read these emails and frankly, he sounds like an idiot. He writes in this half-literate style. Nothing he says is particularly perceptive.
And one thing I was struck by is the extent to which, with these very wealthy, very powerful people, you always hear that they’re so charming. I think it’s that people want to be charmed by someone with wealth and with power and with access to things that they might want. I think that’s true for Epstein. I think it’s true for Trump. One of the useful things about a glimpse into maybe more intimate communications is, it allows you to see how much these people aren’t particularly remarkable, that the only thing that really distinguishes them is that they have money and power.
Cottle: So David, as you noted, this is not the first piece of alleged evidence we’ve seen of Trump’s sexual degeneracy. I mean, we’ve had the “Access Hollywood” tapes going way back, the alleged birthday card for Epstein, multiple allegations by women of his bad behavior. But nothing seems to stick, or at least stick in any way that actually has repercussions for him. So what would it take for this time to be different? Is it just the accretion, or would there have to be something earth shattering?
French: I don’t see that there is anything but incremental losses for Trump.
I think if you look back at everything that you walked through, from the “Access Hollywood” tapes to the E. Jean Carroll situation, to the Epstein revelation so far, to the Ghislaine Maxwell transfer. Pile that on top of Jan. 6; pile that on top of all of the other Trump stuff; and you really realize that — look, everyone who’s sitting there saying, what is the thing? There is no single thing. There are a number of things.
But one thing that seems very clear to me right now is what we have is a one-way ratchet that is moving against Trump in the arena of public support. That everything right now is causing Trump to shed support. And then what’s more dramatic, though, is what’s happening the layer below Trump. That’s where you’re actually seeing dramatic activity. You’re seeing dramatic conflict within the Republican world — that one layer below Trump. Trump is still largely untouchable, but any layer below Trump, and people are willing to rip each other to shreds. And that is the dynamic that is taking place. MAGA below Trump is cracking apart, and so that to me is what’s the actual story of what’s happening right now.
Cottle: Well, I don’t know — it may just be me, but I mean, have you guys noticed the president and his people still seem to be on track to do everything possible to make themselves look more guilty? So this week a new Democratic congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva, was finally sworn in after weeks of delay, and there had been all this grumbling about how she’s long vowed to provide the final necessary signature on a petition to force a House vote on whether to compel the Trump administration to release its Epstein files, which, of course, it was promising to get to the bottom of this for its people long ago, from Day 1. But you know, that’s changed.
So as Grijalva is finally being sworn in, there’s this news that Trump is now putting the screws to Lauren Boebert, one of the few House Republicans who has been willing to do the right thing in this regard and sign on with the transparency group. But the minute it looks like they might have the momentum to get this moving again and force some revelations, Trump jumps in and is squeezing people, which, I don’t know how you can look more guilty. It’s like they’re handling this as poorly as possible.
Is there a logic to this other than they just don’t want people to know what’s in there? I mean, what the hell?
Bouie: I think the logic to this, such that it is — and this goes back to something David said earlier — is that they, Trump specifically, but the people around him, do not know how to engage in politics in any way other than sort of being superaggressive going on the attack and escalating. They don’t know how to do anything else. No other thing seems to occur to them. This is their only mode of operation. We were going to try to use as much force as we can to beat you into submission. And when that doesn’t work, they’re left adrift.
And one thing I want to strongly emphasize is that looking ahead to the next year, the only way things will get better for the administration is if they can somehow recover, switch gears, change course. Whatever you want to use as your metaphor here. And there’s no evidence that they’re capable of doing that. I’m sure they might want to on some level. Like someone who might be addicted to eating ice cream might want to stop, but they don’t.
Cottle: Don’t talk about me like that.
Bouie: But they don’t have the capability to do anything different. And so one assumption I’m operating from is that this right now might be the high-water mark at this point of Trump’s stature with the public. I don’t see it going up in any meaningful sense. I think it’s going to continue to go down because there’s mismanagement of the federal government.
There’s the material stuff, and then there’s the fact, as you point out, Michelle, that whenever any kind of scandal comes up, they seem to make themselves look red-handed. Like taking Lauren Boebert into the Situation Room and trying to put the screws on her just doesn’t make her ——
French: So weird.
Bouie: Look guilty. It makes it look like you have published a book titled “If I Did It.” Right? It puts you into late-period O.J. territory. So I don’t really understand how things are ever going to get better for them.
French: I think that that’s right. I will say, obviously there are events that can occur. Here’s a wild card: One of the things that could actually end up helping Trump quite a bit is that the Supreme Court strikes down his tariffs. Because right now that Trump policy is a huge drag on the economy. So I think if the Supreme Court reverses the tariffs, you might actually see a burst of economic activity and optimism that would be in spite of Trump, not because of Trump. But that is because presidents always benefit from a positive economic development. So I could see that there are events in the future that I could imagine helping Trump. What I cannot see helping Trump is Trump. Who I cannot see helping Trump is MAGA.
Cottle: That’s what I want to get at next, which is that it looks like there is a House vote on the Epstein files. This is going to force Republican lawmakers to make a very uncomfortable choice between supporting their constituents who want transparency and not going against Donald Trump, who does not want these files released. What do they do, David? How do you expect them to navigate this line? And then Jamelle, you after.
French: You’ll see a few peel off — a few more, in addition, I think, to Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie and some of the others who have pushed forward on this.
Cottle: Marjorie Taylor Greene — I have to throw that in. Every time.
French: And you’re going to see a few more peel off because there’s this kind of calculus going on right now, and that calculus is: We know that there is going to be a point in which Donald Trump is a lame duck, and we’re going to have a point where Donald Trump is an anchor on me and my career.
Cottle: Yeah. Me, me, what about me?
French: People are going to be starting to make these kinds of determinations at an increasing rate with every month that passes and we get closer and closer to the end of Trump’s term. And also maybe even closer and closer to the midterms. Because for all of the bluster you saw online about, “Oh, big deal, Democrats won in blue states,” there actually is alarm about what happened on Election Day. And so I think you’re going to see, again, I hate to keep using this word, it’s a broken record: incremental. It’s just going to be incremental.
Bouie: I think that’s about right. There’s not going to be a flood of Republicans fleeing Trump. What there will be are small calculations here and there, willingness to say, “I don’t think I’m going to support this.” I think if this bill to force the White House to release the Epstein files passes the House, I would expect there to be a good deal of pressure on Senate Republicans, and I would expect some of the Senate Republicans to look around the environment and say: “Better to just support this than not.”
The sense that Trump is a lame duck, I think, is growing. I think the shutdown contributed to it quite a bit not simply because it went so long, but because he clearly wasn’t showing any particular leadership during it. There was no indication that he was even capable of resolving it. The fact that there’s no legislation ——
Cottle: And that he just didn’t care.
Bouie: Yeah.
Cottle: That surprised even me.
Bouie: The fact that there’s not really any legislation on the horizon. Is there a Trump bill for anything that anyone sees happening over the next year? No. There’s no particular legislative program. And then he’s becoming more unpopular. So I would suspect that — and I will say not just more unpopular with the public at large, but among Republicans, he’s not in the 80s anymore, 90 percent level. He’s kind of hovering between high 70s, low 80s, which for him is not great.
So I think as Republicans in Congress begin to pick up on what is actually happening in the public, they’re going to, like David says, take incremental steps away from him. But a lot of incremental steps all of a sudden looks like a stampede.
Cottle: Yeah. Yeah.
Bouie: It’s not going to look like a stampede over a course of a month or two months, but we may look back and see quite clearly the movement.
Cottle: OK, so I want to run by both of you something that our colleague Bret Stephens wrote this week about the Epstein mess. He was saying that “the only way any of this sticks politically is a smoking gun, red letter evidence that Trump had a sexual relationship with one of Epstein’s victims. Otherwise, it doesn’t do much but provide fodder for a few manic hours on MSNBC. Democrats need to focus a lot less on Epstein and start worrying a lot more about winning over normal voters with better ideas about governance.”
Agree, disagree? I have thoughts. Go ahead.
Bouie: I disagree with that for two reasons. First is a low-level one. The first one is when you just ask voters: “Do you care about this? What do you think about this?” The answers are, yes, I care about this. I think it’s very troubling. And when you have like two-thirds of American voters consistently saying in surveys that this is something that troubles me, I want to know more about it, it seems to me to be political malpractice to sort of leave it alone.
The other thing related to that is the way modern American scandals work; in fact, it’s not one big revelation that hurts the most. It’s small revelations over time that hurt the most. And so just thinking politically — being amateur political strategists, which I think we should strongly discourage people in our business from doing that — but if we’re going to do it, being an amateur political strategist here, the best thing to do is just to keep it going. Like have it be a thing that he’s asking about constantly. That’s the smart play.
But the other thing is, I think Bret’s analysis misses the symbolic aspect of this stuff. The broad public — and we see this with all these sorts of political insurgencies happening in both parties — are extremely distrustful of the establishment. They’re extremely distrustful of normal politics, of institutional politics. And here we have in the Epstein scandal this example of corruption among the highest reaches of the American political and cultural and economic establishment. Major figures palling around with this guy; politicians palling around with this guy.
And so if voters are telling you in their actions that what they want is some kind of visible representation of you breaking with the way things are normally done, then here is this scandal, which gives you an opportunity to performatively break with the things that are normally done. And it’s breaking with how things are normally done that is going to open the pathway, I think, for voters listening to your other ideas. You show that you’re not just another politician, and then they listen to what you have to say. And so I think, with all respect to Bret, I think his analysis here kind of misses a couple steps and doesn’t take seriously what the voters themselves are saying and signaling in their actions and behavior.
French: So I think of it as short term, long term. I think in the short term it is — Jamelle’s exactly correct that it would be in many ways, I think, political malpractice for Democrats not to focus on this because voters do actually care about it. It’s a target-rich environment, let’s just put it that way. The record is full of people like Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, JD Vance and others saying: We’re going to get to the bottom of Epstein.
And then also there’s this other thing that this is about the only scandal in the Trump era where he’s engaging in that classic political dissembling that makes voters’ antennae go up. Like, is there something real here? Because the other way that he’s dealt with scandal in the past in his administration is just to do it, right out in the public.
I wrote about this. He pardons a guy whose company helped pump up the value of Trump crypto, and he just does it. Or he just releases the memo about trying to extort a political investigation out of Zelensky. He just puts it all out there, and it really confuses voters because they’re not used to politicians just dumping their scandal out on the public and just saying: Here it is. But this is classic political scandal conduct — hiding the ball, working very hard to keep things concealed. And all of that broadcasts to the public that there’s something bad here. And so I think it’d be malpractice for the Democrats not to lean into that in the short term.
But if all you do is win because the other side is bad, then what we’re doing is we’re trapping ourselves more and more into the cycle we’ve been through for the past 20 years, which is: Republicans win. They govern in a way that the public doesn’t like. So voters turn to the opposing party because that’s the only alternative. Then Democrats win, and then very quickly the voters turn to the opposing party, and then we’ve just been doing this every two to four to six years, for 20 years now.
So it is absolutely true that if a party wants to break this logjam for anything more than one election cycle or two election cycles, you do need long-term popular, stable governance, which involves a popular governing agenda that actually works in people’s lives. So you have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Cottle: Yeah, I think that the idea that you can just run against Trump indefinitely is — obviously — you know, look at where we are. That’s what the party tried in 2024 and we wound back up in this pickle. Although I do agree with the point, I think it’s hard to overstate how much voters respond to that kind of “ugh” level scandal.
You can talk about democratic norms and the approaching autocracy and good governance all you want to, and they’ll be like: “Yes, yes. We believe in that.” That’s not what really sets them on fire, though. Something like this is the sexual predator version of taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing, which we’ve all enjoyed the public response to that.
Bouie: Michelle, that actually gets at a thought I just had, which is that I think one of the reasons that people in our business should not be amateur political strategists is that we think in terms of words and messages, but voters think in terms of images.
Cottle: Thank you, yes.
Bouie: That’s what lands with people: images. And so the East Wing is more — you ask a wordsmith, do you think people are going to care about the East Wing? They’ll say, I don’t know so much, but people actually do care about it because it’s a striking and dramatic image, and it represents something on a very visceral level about how they feel about what’s happening in the world.
In the same way, Epstein is primarily about images. Images of this guy with powerful people, images of this guy with teenage girls. These images are quite powerful, and so I think the task for Democrats politically is to be able to conjure up compelling images — compelling images to tar their opponent in. Talking about democracy doesn’t do that, but this might. And then images that demonstrate a commitment to building a better world. For me, dismissing something as vivid as the Epstein scandal, as a political tool ——
Cottle: There’s a good word for it.
Bouie: It does feel like malpractice.
Cottle: Yeah, the press conference the House did with victims of Epstein, I think, caught a lot of people’s attention for exactly that reason. You had actual faces to put to some of this.
But shifting to another set of images, since we’re talking about the potential coming crackup of the Trump coalition, which I know, David, is one of your favorite topics. You’ve also been following the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes saga, which shifts us from sexual predators to groypers. What is the story for those who are out of the loop and how does it fit in with the broader topic?
French: So, let’s talk about both individuals. A lot of listeners will be familiar with Tucker Carlson. They may not be familiar with the turns Tucker Carlson has taken since he’s left Fox News. When he was at Fox, he was a conspiracy theorist. He hasn’t just doubled down on it. He’s quintupled down on that since he’s left Fox News.
He has trafficked in all kinds of antisemitic tropes over the last several years. He’s dived into the 9/11 conspiracy theories. He has given softball interviews to Vladimir Putin. And through all of that, he is, by some measures, a very popular podcaster on the right. He then invited a guy named Nick Fuentes on, and a lot of listeners may not be familiar with this guy because he’s not somebody who you’re going to see on television. But he’s a very popular Nazi-sympathizing fan of Adolf Hitler. And when I say all of that ——
Cottle: Does that go on his business card? Oh, my God.
French: When I say all of that, you’re thinking: Wait, what? An actual fan of Adolf Hitler? And he’s popular? Yes. I mean, this is a guy who will say things like Team Hitler. He’s a guy who has denied the Holocaust. We’re not talking about dog-whistle antisemitism from this guy. It’s bullhorn antisemitism. And he’s built a big following. He’s got about half a million followers on this video platform called Rumble.
So Tucker Carlson has him on his podcast for what can only be described as just an incredibly softball interview. And for whatever reason, this blew up on the right, and it created some real anger, especially online. Then the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most prominent sort of think tank in the MAGA universe, came forward. And the president of the Heritage Foundation condemned the “venomous coalition” critiquing Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
Unbelievable stuff. This led to a staff revolt at Heritage. It has led to a giant fight on the right over the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes interview, where you’re really clearly seeing the different factions emerge. And it’s also ——
Cottle: The pro-Nazis versus anti-Nazis?
French: Or let’s say, just say Nazi-curious versus not. And Rod Dreher wrote that about 30 to 40 percent of Republican male staffers on the Hill are what you would call groypers. And what is a groyper? They are people who follow Nick Fuentes. You’re not going to encounter many of them in the offline world. You’re not going to encounter many of them in the real world. You know where you’re going to encounter them a lot? In the ranks of young MAGA Republicans. And so all of this is spilling out now into the open, and it’s causing an enormous fight within the right.
And you can sort of see Tucker Carlson as the avatar for one side of it; and then Ben Shapiro on the very, very, very definite anti-Nazi side of it. So you’re literally seeing people viciously attacking Ben Shapiro. Why? Because Ben Shapiro has mounted his horse and is righteously taking on Nazi sympathizers in the Republican coalition and he’s getting massive blowback about it, which is shocking. It is shocking when you think about it.
Bouie: So, I don’t find it that shocking because this has been — I mean, the groyperization of the Republican staffer class, you might say, the young men who are entering into Republican politics — has been an ongoing thing for a couple years.
Back in 2017, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right incident, a writer, Alex Pareene, wrote a piece saying that is the future of the Republican Party. That what we saw there, those young men are the future of the Republican Party. And he was right. This thing has been happening for almost a decade now, and now I’d say it’s almost a little too late to push back. So, of course, he’s getting into ferocious pushback because it’s almost like a fait accompli at this point. It’s happened. You scroll the feeds of the Department of Homeland Security and what you see are like explicit allusions to Nazi propaganda.
The vice president of the United States, JD Vance, pals around with people like Curtis Yarvin, who although does not identify as a neo-Nazi, has sort of like, you might say, Nazi-adjacent ideology about the domination of subhuman peoples. This is just part of the firmament of a good deal of professional Republican politics right now. And I don’t know what to do about it. But the rise of Fuentes as a player could be seen coming a mile away, and it’s so clearly been percolating.
French: Jamelle’s so right here. I mean, I was jumping up and down about this more than 10 years ago because more than 10 years ago, the alt-right emerged from the shadows, directly attacked my family in the most vicious and brutal ways you can possibly imagine. One of the reasons why I’m no longer a Republican, and one of the reasons why I very quickly became no longer welcome in a lot of conservative circles, is because I was calling this stuff out. They were saying: Shut up. The real enemy is Hillary Clinton. The real enemy is the Democrats. And so they were allowing into the tent anyone who would train their fire on the Democrats, and they were shoving away outside of the tent, anyone who was saying: We’ve got a problem on the right.
All of these things together started to pull some of the worst figures in American politics, including neo-Nazis, right into this broader right-wing tent.
Cottle: This all feels to me a little bit like what we’ve watched with the Trump movement from the very beginning, whereas these people make these accommodations in part because they think they can manipulate or control or make use of the extreme elements in their party, but not get swallowed up by them.
But then you turn around and next thing you know, you’re in Congress and trying to decide if you are going to vote in a way that makes you look like you’re covering up child sexual predation. It’s like once you go down this road and start accepting stuff that you could never have imagined embracing before, on the assumption that you can control it, you’re just asking for a whole lot of trouble. Sorry.
Bouie: I would go even further and say that being put in a situation where you may have to vote to cover up child sexual abuse is not just a hazard, but I’d say like the inevitable result of this. The kinds of politics we’re describing are politics that are built on exploitation and domination and hierarchy and the destruction of other people.
And historically speaking, that stuff has always been tied up in the worst kinds of abuse of other human beings, not just in an organized state-centered way, but also in a direct and quite personal way. So my knowledge base is American history and history of the 19th century, and we have loads of evidence attesting to pervasive child sexual abuse in the slaveholding South.
That was the whole thing, and those people produced ideologies that on the surface were all about order and organic community and such. But when it came down to brass tacks, they were just elaborate justifications for dominating other people in the most disgusting and exploitative ways. I see the same exact patterns with these modern-day neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi sympathizers, and all of these people — it’s the same thing. There’s a direct line from disparaging the Declaration of Independence, which our vice president has done, and engaging in apology for really awful behavior and really awful conduct and really awful ways of relating to people.
French: Let me put it this way: People were more angry at me for calling attention to the fact that neo-Nazis had photoshopped pictures of my then 7-year-old daughter into gas chambers with Donald Trump in an SS uniform pressing the button to kill her. They were more upset that I was calling attention to that fact than they were that that happened. Why? Because they didn’t want me to undermine the sense of solidarity against Hillary Clinton.
And if that is the dynamic, if that is the moral calculus here, then everything that has happened since was almost inevitable at this point. Because once you have said: I’m going to accommodate neo-Nazi expression for the greater good of taking down a mainstream Democrat, then you’ve lost your way. You have absolutely lost your way. And here we are.
Cottle: I’m comfortable taking a hard anti-Nazi, pro-David French stance. I’m just going to come right out there and say it.
French: Thank you, Michelle. I appreciate that.
Cottle: I’m with you, David.
OK, so let’s turn this after that dark discussion. Let’s turn this to some recommendations. What do you got for me, guys? And I don’t want to hear anything about Nazis.
Bouie: That was a very, very, very smooth transition.
French: I love that transition. That was pro-right there.
Cottle: Work with me, people!
Bouie: How about you go first, David.
French: OK. This is easy. This is the easiest recommendation week ever. One word: “Pluribus.” It’s by the creator Vince Gilligan of “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad,” starring Rhea Seehorn, who is Kim Wexler in ——
Cottle: Love her.
French: In “Better Call Saul.” It’s one of these shows that really was wrapped up in a lot of secrecy. So all I’m going to say is, in the opening three minutes, you discover that there is a beam being emitted from about 600 light-years away and it has a message in it, obviously coming from an alien intelligence. And then — just watch it. It’s so phenomenal. It’s just great. I’m so excited. I’m just vaguely mad that it’s coming out once per week and you can’t binge it.
Cottle: I need to binge. I really resent the nonbingeable things. What do you got for me?
Bouie: I have a movie. So, listeners and viewers may know that I buy lots of physical media. I have a big Blu-ray collection, and recently, a couple months ago, I bought a new release of the 1992 film “Sneakers,” directed by Phil Alden Robinson and starring the most stacked cast you can imagine — starring Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Mary McDonald, River Phoenix and David Strathairn.
It’s about two former hackers who all go separate ways and they get embroiled in a grand conspiracy. It’s kind of an obscure movie — rarely makes it onto a list of things to see from the ’90s. But I think if you could imagine a movie version of a big warm bowl of chicken soup, this is what this movie is. It’s so fun and comforting and I highly recommend checking it out. It also looks incredible. It’s a very good-looking movie.
Cottle: Well, it’s got Robert Redford, so ——
Bouie: Yeah, it does have Robert Redford.
Cottle: By definition, it’s good looking. That sounds perfect for my holiday viewing if I’m going into that comfort mode.
Bouie: It’s a good Thanksgiving Day movie. Actually, it’s a perfect Thanksgiving Day movie. I’m usually the one doing the cooking. So if I’m in the kitchen and there’s something on the TV, you can put “Sneakers” on the TV and people will enjoy it.
Cottle: Ah, perfect. OK, well, I’m going with a kind of nebulous recommendation, which is that I’m recommending people get out there and organize a group outing that gets their friends out of their comfort zone. What brought this up is that come Friday, I am rallying a group of about a half-dozen women to go take a line-dancing and two-stepping class. I like to dance.
It is hard to find line dancing in Washington, D.C. I have rallied the troops. I like to do this all the time. Over the years I’ve rallied people to go skeet shooting, karaoke — all kinds of things. Salsa dancing, that sort of thing. And it’s always something that your friends are like, eh, really? But then they have a great time.
French: So anytime I hear the word dancing, Michelle, or that anyone’s going dancing, my inner eighth-grade self comes out, which means in real life, I would stand on the edge of the room affirmatively not dancing. And in the virtual life of a conversation means I shuffle to the edge of that conversation.
Bouie: I would go dancing. I think it’s fun.
Cottle: Would you?
Bouie: Yeah.
Cottle: Well, if you drive back up Friday, Jamelle, you’re welcome to join us. I’m very much looking forward to it. And if it goes well, this could just be what I do on Fridays. I’m just saying.
All right, guys, I think that’s it. If you do anything over the weekend out of your comfort zone, I expect you to report back to me. OK?
Bouie: All right.
French: Will do.
Cottle: Guys, thanks so much. Let’s do it again next week.
French: Thanks, Michelle.
Bouie: Looking forward to it.
I
Credit: Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator.
His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
