Will Iran Break Trumpism?

30:47How is this an answer to a problem of democracy? I think that he was democratically elected by a lot of people who care about democracy and who speak about democracy a lot. That's what I think that a lot of those people at those rallies were doing. And that's what I think they were voting for. But I have a hard time distinguishing different presidents as symbolizing democracy more than others. They're all elected, you know, but he was chosen by people who cared a lot about, who felt, let's say, excluded from the decision-making process and picked him for that reason. I agree that they felt that he was an answer to making sure their will was done.

31:39I think the tension I'm trying to get you to sort of think through here with me is if what you see before you is a country where the will of the people is not being done, how is this president who tends to be either voted for or approved of by certainly less than majorities, never won a popular vote majority, how is he an answer to that? I don't, I'm sorry, I just don't think that's a problem at all. I think that we have a system which is, you know, it's a republic. The executive is elected by a sort of a majoritarian, you know, let's say a filtered majoritarian, filtered through the electoral college.

32:24And sometimes that system produces presidents who only have a plurality, and sometimes it produces presidents who have lost the popular vote. Clinton, from 1992 to 96, had 42 or 43. He, too, I mean, was in very difficult straits up until, you know, I would say the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995. That is, he was really, you know, underwater for the first three years of his presidency. I'm not saying— But no one said he wasn't— I'm not saying he's— It was democratically legitimate. I'm not saying he's illegitimate. That's not my view. Um, the thing that interested me about the piece was to like lay out my theory of you.

33:06Oh, yeah. You have a long running argument that the forms of right wing populism we are seeing here and across Europe are efforts at democratic, small d, democratic restoration. And so I saw you and tell me which part of this I have wrong because I'm genuinely interested. I saw you as basically saying in this piece, the reason this will break what Trumpism is or means or could mean is that Trump is supposed to be an element of the popular will, but he is pursuing this unpopular war that nobody in this country really in any broad sense has asked for. and on the one hand i sort of agree with that and on the other hand not because he's illegitimate but because he is typically unpopular and his major initiatives have often been quite unpopular i find it strange to understand him as an instrument of popular will he's a very divisive person and president and leader who represents some people very well and others very very poorly But in your vision of populism as sort of small-D democratic, he seems an awkward fit.

34:19I mean, I think that we unfortunately are passing through a period when presidents have a hard time pleasing everybody. I mean, there are a few broadly popular presidents. But I think that what I said was that this was the end of Trumpism. I mean, of this coalition as something that really had an opportunity to sort of shift the conversation or the direction of the country. It really had nothing to do with thinking that he symbolizes something democratic for the whole country, although I think he probably does for his followers. You've described Trump as a populist. I think that the Democratic view of Trump is he's a wannabe authoritarian posing as a populist.

35:09I'm curious what you think of that. Um, he's certainly shown more, more of that affect lately, but he's so shaped by a totally different industry than politics that I have a hard time seeing it. And in fact, I'm always struck looking at Trump by the way a lot of his actions are not those of a rule maker, but those of a guy who still thinks that the rules are actually being made somewhere else and that he needs to get something out of it. Like, I'm going to get something out of the UAE on this deal. I'm going to get something out of Qatar. It's going to, you can sell it as saving the country money, but it's going to get me a plane and things like, it's not, he often seems more like someone ringing concessions out of someone than like someone ordering things someone around.

36:06I think there's some truth to that, that more than he wants to engage in a structured, deliberate effort to cohere power around him, he wants to have people paying him tribute. He sort of acts like he has more power than he has, but in acting that way, he's able to wring a lot out of the system, out of people who might be engaging in business deals, at least with his family and around him and from other countries. In the way he has pursued his tariffs, he's not setting up a bunch of complex bilateral trade deals and passing them through Congress. He's just coming to a deal with the country and then announcing the deal.

36:52In his attacks on universities, he's not pushed a comprehensive higher ed reform through the House and the Senate. He is coming to individual deals with individual universities. Yuval Levin, the conservative intellectual, who I'm sure you know, he has this line that I like where he says that Trump governs retail, not wholesale. And I think there's real truth to that. Yeah. I mean, Obama's deal with Iran, I believe, was done in a similar way. It was just you go and you bargain with the leaders and you come back and here's the deal. I don't think that was ever ratified as a treaty, you know. So Trump is not alone in that.

37:33But I think that the instance you mentioned of the universities, he really got a lot of results out of that a year ago. But I think that that strategy is really reaching its limits. I mean, I think the universities that have stood up to him have fared fairly well. But I also think one reason it's appealing to Trump is that it allows him to act as opposed to having to wait on all these other institutions to act. I mean, you sort of frame the broader state, what can get called the deep state, as its issue is that it is undemocratic. whereas I think Trump's issue with it is that it is restraining, slow.

38:11I mean, I wrote a book called Abundance, which is very much about the way this kind of state often holds Democrats back from doing things because they get caught up in proceduralism that they themselves might even support, but they still are not getting what they want done. And I think you see this tendency with Trump quite a bit after the sort of 12-day bombing of Iran last summer when he was getting criticized from kind of some of these figures we've been talking about in MAGA, he said, well, considering that I'm the one that developed America first and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that, that being what it actually means.

38:50And I think Trump's tendency to not want to have like complex frameworks around him instead to just be the decider himself, on the one hand, does not feel like, I mean, and I think you're agreeing with this, democratic restoration to and on the other hand feels very intrinsic to who he is and who he has been. Yes. I think that when Trump brought the United States into that war, it seems like nothing now. And the United States was famously, the United States was only in that war for 40 minutes, you know. But none of us, or at least certainly not me, I don't assume that you can enter a war and then get out at will.

39:28I think that's why you don't go into a war, because they're really, really much more complex to get out of than anyone ever thinks. But he ended that war and said, OK, we're done. We're done. And it seemed like a kind of a magical thing. You know, if he hadn't been able to do that, we could have had this whole conversation a year ago. But he was able to do that. the worrisome thing though at the time was that was the second episode where he made the whole decision for the whole world himself but it was really an illusion that that decision was in all in his hands because at that moment at that end of 12 days israel was kind of reaching the point that it's reaching now or it seems to be if it's not running out of anti-rocket suppressant you know, ammunition, it's at least conserving them.

40:19And so it's getting very vulnerable to Iranian attacks. And so they could have kept going if someone had been of a mind to. And I think the same is true of the Chinese with the Liberation Day tariffs. The threat to cut off its trade of rare earths with us was really perceived as quite a grave threat in Washington. It's nothing you'd want to try if you weren't 100 % sure it was going to work. And so that was the worrisome thing about Trump in 2025, that he was a little bit overconfident in his ability to do this kind of unilateral governing without placing the country's fate in someone else's hands.

41:03I think this gets to a sort of philosophically quite complicated place, which is I take seriously the conservative critique, and sometimes the liberal critique, that the administrative state comes at some cost of democratic oversight. And on the other hand, the world operates at a sufficient level of complexity and vastness that it is hard to imagine how you would effectively apprehend it without these deep reservoirs of experience that persist across administrations that are not meant to be wholly political and whose advice is partially there and whose procedures are partially there to keep presidents and countries from getting into trouble they did not necessarily want to be in.

41:55Yeah, and there is a certain tendency to take things for granted. If they persist for too long, there's a tendency to take them as laws of nature. Like we sort of thought that this expertise was something that was inherent in American government, and it's inherent in the administrative state part of the government. So is there some part of you that is feeling more warmly towards that state than you were two years ago? I don't think I ever feel totally warmly or totally coldly towards anything. I recognize the virtues of the administrative state, although I share the sense that it had been developed to the point where a lot of ordinary Americans felt that it was maybe futile to try and influence the direction of the state.

42:42I mean, I'd seen a roundtable you did with Chris Ruffo and Curtis Yarvin around Doge. Doge was ill-defined from the beginning, vaguely defined, certainly, but people latched on particular hopes to Doge. And you all were higher at that moment on sort of taking the administrative state apart, or at least that's the impression I got. And you said then that efficiency was a necessary smokescreen for Doge. The only alternative was to say that this operation is an ideological purge. That's what it was. Which is what it was. That's what it was. It's a much less acceptable story to present to the public than we're saving money.

43:25Yeah, I mean, I don't think I said that in any kind of collusive way, but I don't think Doge was primarily about efficiency. Do you? I mean, I don't think the savings were... I don't think Doge was about efficiency at all. I don't think the savings were significant. Well, the savings weren't significant. What I understood Doge as in real time and what I still understand it as now was an effort to break the will of the administrative state to resist Donald Trump, to, I think, Russ Vogt talked about it as traumatizing the civil servants. And I understood the arguments that people around Trump made for doing this.

44:02They're feeling that they were slowed down in the first term, that there were things that they were elected to do that they were not able to do. And on the other hand, the way it was done and the ideology behind it came with such a almost dismissal of the idea that there was expertise, procedure, knowledge that was needed and necessary and maybe, in fact, had stopped terrible things from happening in the first term. And I think we're sort of living through some of the aftermath of that now. I would say just probably the way they primarily looked at it was as sort of a source of permanent political advantage for their opponents, as a place where progressives could be parked when Democrats were out of power.

44:47And I think that that's the way they looked at it. I'm not sure they had a theory of expertise, but they may well have.

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46:22Let me ask you, as somebody who's done a lot of work on European right-wing movements, how you think Trump and MAGA or the Republican Party under Trump, how it is similar and how it is different to what gets called the populist right in Europe. A sort of mistake we have to make here, I think, is to see Trump as a one of one. But there are other movements that have echoes and have predated him and have, you know, changed since him. And you've done a lot of work writing about them. So how do you see Trump as being similar and how do you seem as being different than his analogs in Europe? I think the German case is very interesting to look at, the AFD, because that really is a populist party.

47:06They have a different system, right? The populist wing of their right is a separate party. It's not a two-party system. But, you know, it'd be like if MAGA here was not part of the Republican Party. Here's its own party. That's right. So the one thing that struck me as very similar about Germany is that Germany has a You know, they have a whole set of constraints on democracy that have come down as a result of World War II and of the Holocaust more than anything, you know, just as a lot of our constraints on free association and things come from our experience with slavery and segregation. One thing that struck me in studying Germany is that we have a tendency, because their misdeeds are not ours and we can face them more squarely, we have a tendency to look at them, at the AFD, as being a more radical party than Trump.

48:06I would say if I had to name the main impulse behind the AFD, it would be something that I've heard Donald Trump say a lot, which is, can't we talk about the good part of our country too? I mean, we produced a lot of great composers, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think that that is something culturally that the Germans have in common with Donald Trump. France is sort of the opposite issue. Everyone in France, because fascism is sort of like such a horrifying proposition to them and because they did have a collaborationist movement during World War II, everyone tends to call there anyone they think is unduly conservative a fascist.

48:54but I don't see the national front really as fascist at all. They'd have very few fascist traits. They've never called for coming to power through anything except elective democracy. What's really motivating them is immigration. That's the heart and soul of their movement. In a way, I think that's true of maybe not in every state, Trump's movement, But that's true of Trump, too. And then Brexit is Nigel Farage's reform party. Even though it seems like we have no analogy to the European Union, we actually do. The European Union plays the same role, I think, in European thinking about populism that our administrative state does.

49:45It's a kind of outside authority to which decisions which we formally think should be decided through democracy get shunted off onto experts. When you look at these movements and you look at these arguments, do you see them as fundamentally procedural? It's about democracy. It's about the administrative state. It's about to achieve an end, that it's really about what goals you can achieve, maybe in some of the European cases, and actually here too, it's about immigration, it's about the demographic composition of the country, it's about the religious composition of the country, and the feeling is that there is a will that is, you know, maybe not even majoritarian, but maybe it is stronger among the people who traditionally were the majority in a state or in a country, and that it is about their feeling of being foiled and being up against a force that they cannot quite vote out of office, but is leading to a country they no longer recognize.

50:57Yeah, and it comes up particularly with nationalism and immigration and things like that. You know, post-World War II people tend to look at things very procedurally, as you say. And so, yeah, I do tend to look for procedural commonalities in these movements. And to the extent that these movements are made up of baby boomers and Gen Xers, I think they tend to be procedural too. So, in fact, when you talk to people in the national front about how they want to restrict immigration and you say, what do you mean you want to restrict immigration from Africa or something? They say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

51:45And they're very defensive. And as you say, procedural. There used to be a whole variety of goals that you could say you wanted your country to achieve, right? They were sort of like, you know, to the greater glory of God or whatever. Now they tend to be, people tend to look at them only as nationalistic. But there are two exceptions to this, I think, where people are less procedural, okay? And one is in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, you don't, because people didn't have as much control over the political system at all, they haven't acquired the habit of thinking about politics in terms of political procedure the way we have.

52:28And the other is among young people, the people who are too young to have like drawn big benefits from just obeying the rules and following the order the way, you know, boomers and Xers did. One thing that struck me about that is that Trump is by his nature, very unprocedural. And I know less about the European context than you do, but he's been very straightforward. At least part of his immigration goals is where people come from. He's talked about not wanting people from shithole countries. And that, you know, whether Gen X and the boomers are procedural, it has seemed to me that one of the things that many of Trump's supporters, at the very least, like about him is that he is an answer procedure.

53:13I don't think that what appeals to people about him is that they think he is small-D democratic. I think what appeals to people about him is that he just does things. and he tells you what he thinks. He doesn't seem to be talking to you in the language of media training or, you know, bureaucracy or the sort of institutional grammar that you hear from both Democrats and Republicans, actually. And in his second term, much more than in his first, that the way he understands it is he's in charge and he's going to do what he thinks is best. And there is, not for all, for some, it's repellent But for others, there is something very compelling about that action-oriented, power-oriented leadership that feels in a very deep way like a throwback to another time.

54:12You actually mentioned in, I think it was this piece, a piece about Trump as a kind of Hegelian great man of history. Yes, I mentioned in a tremendous essay by John Judas, who talks about Trump as a historic catalyst. And as a sort of a rupture between orders. Yes. And as a rupture of this kind of liberal institutionalist order into something else. Right. By which he does not mean to say that Trump necessarily knows he's playing this role or understands the transformation he's bringing about. What do you take from that? What do you think he's a rupture into? Oh, goodness gracious. I mean, these are the things that seem to be sometimes forming before our eyes.

54:57You know, sometimes you get the impression that there's an actual shift of power from governments to corporations and things like that. Like, there's an article in the Times about how more and more tech companies are producing their own power, right? They're not on the grid. They're sort of like they're owning a grid. They're taking on yet another attribute of a government. So it's been possible to imagine that, you know, that we're going from states to corporations. So I don't know. Things form and unform, and I don't really see the final version of where we're heading yet. There's another piece that you wrote in 2021, working off of a book by a French political theorist.

55:43That I think maybe offers another dimension of this. The argument of that piece was that America and the West were repaganizing. Walk me through some of that argument. I think that was Chantal Del Sol's book, which was a very provocative essay. She's a Catholic philosopher, but her basic way of proceeding is, you know, look, we had all these institutions that were built around religion and specifically Christianity and in France, specifically Catholicism. They're now being undone. What does this mean to a civilization? She said, well, the best way to look at it is the last time this happened, which is when these institutions were being constructed through the undoing of the pagan institutions.

56:32And so that was basically a typological comparative history of like, let's say, the 4th century AD to the 21st century. And I confess I forget what I drew from that. I'll read you the paragraph in it. I'm interested in such arguments. I'll read you the paragraph that caught my eye. You wrote, Mistsel's ingenious approach is to examine the civilizational change underway in light of that last one 1 ,600 years ago. Christians brought what she calls a normative inversion to pagan Rome. That is, a prized much that the Romans held in contempt and condemned much that the Romans prized, particularly in matters related to sex and family.

57:13Today, the Christian overlay on Western cultural life is being removed, revealing a lot of the pagan urges that it covered up. I don't know about the whole, I'll leave scholars of paganism and Christianity to debate if these are the right terms, and I'm not thinking about things 1 ,600 years ago. But to me, that actually describes a lot of what Trump is, this normative inversion of the values that dominated before him. He's a sort of return to this much more highly masculine, patrimonial, the great man takes what he want and grabs what he wants and says what he wants. And all these sort of post-war institutions and ways of talking and niceties that when he violates them, that's very much part of his appeal.

57:57He's this kind of inversion. And every time he violates them, he is proving himself free of them. But to me, one thing about Trump and when he talks about his ability to shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters when he says it's sort of I am MAGA and what I say goes, is I do think part of his appeal is that we have sort of pushed down the, in American politics, you know, the desire for a certain kind of strongman leader. and we've tamed many of those ideas in institutions and rules in this beautiful constitution and part of what trump both is able to do and part of his appeal certainly to his most hardcore supporters why i don't think they break with him over this issue or that issue is that he's more about a form of leadership and will and strength and impulse that he is representative of on an almost like mythopoetic level than he is about any kind of individual set of policies.

59:06It's interesting, but I see where you're going with it. And I think he does like to be strong. He has an idea of strength. I tend not to agree with you that that's what his followers are looking for from him. And I think that it costs him followers slowly, but surely. And I I think that if you're going to, you know, as Bob Dylan said, you know, to live outside the law, you must be honest. And in fact, to live as a sort of like roving sort of like man who makes his own rules, you have to have a kind of a code. And so when Trump does things like say what he said about Rob Reiner. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.

59:51Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump derangement syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the golden age of America upon us, perhaps like never before.

1:00:36May Rob and Michelle rest in peace. A number of Republicans have denounced your statement on True Social after the murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by that post? Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. He said, which I actually think might be the hinge moment of his entire presidency. If that's your idea of life and death, if that's your idea of how much respect human life deserves, then the public kind of has to reassess its idea of where it can follow you in matters that involve life and death, including war. And I mean, the fact that he's done this again and again, he did it the second time with Reiner, he did it with Robert Mueller over the past weekend when he died.

1:01:23That's really transgressive. I don't think it's clicking with anybody. But it doesn't seem to cost him much support. And it has always felt like part of him. I remember the things he said about gold star families when, you know, one opposed him at the Democratic National Convention talking about John McCain and saying he prefers heroes who weren't captured. I mean, the transgression. Look, I think what Donald Trump says routinely and certainly what he said about Reiner was vicious and repulsive. But I have to admit, I cannot see on a poll that it changed anything for him. But it's so interesting.

1:01:59So why for you is it such a hinge? Because I say it's interesting because I have talked to progressive friends about this too, and they don't see it. They just think Trump is saying crazy things all the time. I think this is very different than, you know, the Gold Star family sort of thing had to do with the Democratic National Convention in 2016, where the Democrats brought up a family and they were trying to use the death of this family's son to run down Trump. And it was kind of a political trick, you know, the way the Trump campaign did the same thing with the deaths in the Benghazi consulate in Libya.

1:02:38But that was very different. I think that was just Trump standing up to a political trick. This is actually a kind of an irreverence. Do you know what I mean? So your argument is not so much that these things are hurting him in the polls now because they're clearly not with his own base in any significant way. I mean, if you look from Rob Reiner to now, his polling is extremely similar. You're saying, though, that there is some set of moral policy corruption transgressions that in some accumulative way that you feel he is building a pressure and that at some point, and maybe it's doing so in a slow way, he is going down slowly.

1:03:22but there is like the real possibility of a crack up that people don't want this that his people don't want this yes i think that his people don't want this and so just because i know i'm a weird polling obsessed uh former washingtonian why do you think then we don't see it there in the polls in the polls well i think there's maybe a qualitative realignment and we do live in a kind of a polarized country. And so where are they going to go to what other tendency in the Republican Party or outside the Republican Party are people going to go? It's very hard for people to move along an ideological spectrum the way they could in the older days.

1:04:05There's a big gap between different visions of politics now that no one represents. And so I think it'll be more of a quantum movement when that movement makes itself apparent. I also wonder, as Trump kind of pulls at the bonds of this movement, that I think he is able to hold quite a lot together through people's personal commitment to him, their personal fear of him to some degree in the Republican Party. But the question of what America First is when it ranges now from Tucker Carlson to Marco Rubio, to Mark Levine, to, you know, all the other people who in some level are claimed to speak for it or who Trump at some point has allowed to speak for it.

1:04:52You did a very interesting profile of J.D. Vance when he was running for Senate in Ohio. I wonder, as somebody who is sort of more on the intellectual side of the new right, if you think this is something anybody else can hold together outside of this one leader. A lot of politicians are really helped by having no resume whatsoever and to arrive in politics without owing anyone anything or without having stepped on anybody's toes or without having, you know, accumulated resentments from voters. And Obama is an obvious example of that. Trump, I think, lucked out in landing on the Republican Party when it was brought into such crisis by George W.

1:05:35Bush. But I don't really see the principle on which the party is being held together. And an interesting thing, it's a much larger subject probably than we have time to deal with it. But there doesn't seem to be a replacement for the economic theory that kept a lot of largely apolitical sort of like middle class people attached to the Republican Party throughout the Reagan years. So, no, I don't see the replacement ideology because I don't really see the replacement system quite yet. I don't see what the system is going to look like after this transformation. This, to me, is the way that if you told me by October Trump had really fallen, that he was at 34 or 32 percent, this, to me, is where it would come from.

1:06:23that I do think among the many parts of Trump's appeal was that he was understood to be a businessman, understood to be somebody who could work within a system that he told you and you believed was corrupt. And, I mean, after losing in 2020, Joe Biden came in and inflation went up and people were furious and they remembered the Trump economy, you know, so the pre-pandemic one as pretty good. And we'll see what happens. But if this war keeps going on and we get to oil at$175 a barrel and things begin breaking, I don't think people are willing to pay a cost for Trump's impulse here. and to have him create a surge of inflation and scarcity, I'm not sure is survivable for a war that very, very few people were asking for.

1:07:23I think that's right. And I think that that's why he's been moving so gingerly and trying to sweet talk the markets so much. I think we'll know a lot more in a couple of weeks about whether we're heading to that point that you described. What would recovery look like to you If in a year we're sitting here and it turns out that Trumpism is very much not over, either what do you think you will have seen or what would be the signals of revived health? What I think a revival would look like, it would be an economic thing. That is, the economic part of the closed border type politics would click for some reason that it hasn't already.

1:08:04And that is, you would have a tight labor market. You would have dramatic wage growth in the lower part of the, you know, the lower quintiles of the labor market. And you might even have, you know, a tariff regime where tariffs were being used to collect a certain amount of, you know, the national revenue that they were creating a slight preference for for manufacturing in America, but without distorting international trade unduly. and that would probably mean that they would have to return to something like a uniform tariff. I mean, I'm not suggesting this as a policy, but I'm saying that if you had a Trump revival, that would be a big part of it, probably.

1:08:46I think that's a good place to end. Then also, our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? I think everyone should read The Gulag Archipelago. I think that that is such a wonderful book. And this is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's a story of his time in a Soviet prison camp, but it's so much more than that. It's three volumes. It's got a history of Russia. It's got a history of the Soviet Union. It's got poetry. It's really a very capacious book in the way that, say, Boswell's Life of Johnson is. Since we're talking about politics, I think if you asked me to name the best political book, it would probably be J.

1:09:24Anthony Lucas's Common Ground, which is a book about busing in Boston, which is kind of the first political event that I have any memory of from being a child. And then I guess if I could recommend a baseball book, a book that really sort of changed the way I, I don't know, look at both sports and writing is Ball Four by Jim Boughton. I don't know if you know that book. I don't. Jim Boughton was a 20-game winner with the Yankees in the early 60s. And he had two great years, went to the World Series, blew his arm out. And six years later, he fought and tried to make a comeback. He taught himself the knuckleball.

1:10:06And he came back with an expansion team, the Seattle Pilots, which are now the Milwaukee Brewers. And he kept a diary. And he was a very, very weird guy and kind of an intellectual and an opponent to the Vietnam War. And he sort of wrote about the drugs that the players were taking. It was a very kind of salacious book, but it's a really beautifully written book with a kind of great plot at the heart of it, actually, even though it's just a baseball season diary. Chris Caldwell, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.

1:10:48This episode of The Ezra Clancho is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristen Lynn, Emek Helbeck, and Jan Koble. Original music by Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Similewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser. Thank you.