The Bulwark Podcast

It's like what who what parents which parents not me, I'm a parent. Well, that's why it's so deliciously ironic that all of these book bans and things like this are being pushed under the banner of freedom. This is the freedom agenda minutes. Now, you know what people would understand what I mean by Orwellian if they didn't ban that book too, but you never

Her portrait of Trump in her book Confidence Man emphasizes his assent in the New York City of the 70s and 80s.

The book is The Confidence Man, the making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America.

The book paints a jarring portrait of Trump, but one that differs in some respects from more common one-dimensional portraits. As a basically lonely man whose own views and attitudes are amorphous and situational rather than strategic, he can be charming and cruel, generous and selfish, tolerant and viciously closed minded.

Confidence Man can be read two ways, and I think is. And one is that he is indeed somebody who exudes confidence. There's no question about that. But the textbook definition of a Confidence Man, if you yield internet, is somebody who uses their persuasive nature and abilities to take things from other people.

And the book is Confidence Man, the making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman.

Your most recent book is Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.

Edward Luce is U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. His books include, and I have it right here, The Retreat of Western Liberalism from 2017.

And by the way, Ed was reading the blurb, scariest blurb on the cover of a book ever from Lauren Summers. Edward Luce provides a terrifying view of the challenges facing the West. We have to hope that his prophecies are self-denying, something that is more likely if his penetrating analysis gets the wide attention it richly deserves.

This is your third historical novel. I mean, the first one, The Hellfire Club was was in the 1950s and the McCarthy era. And you had fictional protagonists, you know, Congressman Charlie Marger and his wife right in the thick of the McCarthy hearings.

He is the author of The Room Where It Happened, a White House memoir published in 2020.

I wrote a 500 page book on what my opinion of the presidency is.

I wrote a 500 page book that laid it all out in ways that I thought were clear and I hope it had an effect on the 2020 election I don't know whether it did or not but it was much more effective to go that way than to rush into the spotlight for a few moments

if you've read his book you probably have become aware of that

And the next book, The Devil May Dance is set in the 60s where you had Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and all of those guys and and the whole story of John Kennedy and Sinatra.

I actually wrote about this in my book.

And as I say in my book, either you feed the beast or the beast feeds on you.

And what it indicated to me is that this is someone who when 30% of people want to learn more about you should be going out and doing more interviews.

Instead, we're in a real-life spies like us novel, where the spies are even stupider than Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase, and the Republicans are even more pliable than a fiction writer of an 80s Soviet movie could have ever even imagined.

Doll's books and not just his books but his memoirs, Boy and Going Solo which are great and I highly recommend to anyone who hasn't read those real life stories because they give you a real sense of where Roald Dahl was coming from.

just the other day in the mail I got my bound copy of The Final Report which was a wow that is a heavy lift.

I think most importantly in 10 years there is not going to be a single person besides in like the weird opium dens of whatever city that will ever admit that they actually believed you know that the election was stolen because I think the facts that we put out the truth that we've put out that we discovered will be the mainstream narrative in the future

whose latest book is American Psychosis also writes the newsletter Our Land.

David Korn, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. David is the DC Bureau Chief for Mother Jones. His latest book is American Psychosis.

He also wrote Hoax about Fox News and his new book, his new best-selling book, which we're going to be talking about, Network of Lies.

I was thinking of a movie I really liked called A History of Violence with Viggo Mortensen and William Hurt.

William Hurt is this Irish mobster who has put out what he thinks is a very simple hit. And by the end of the movie, there's like bodies everywhere and there's blood and his mansion is a shambles and he's wandering around with a gun yelling, how do you fuck that up?

Michael Fanone is a former vice officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC for 20 years. And you all know who he is because you remember the pictures from January 6th. You know who he is because you've seen the body cam footage as have a number of federal courts more recently. And you also remember his dramatic testimony before the January 6th committee where he said this...

So Michael, your new book is Hold Align, The Insurrection in One Cops Battle for America's Soul. So let's start with this. How is the battle for the soul going?

I wish they would have killed all you scum bags, because you people are scum. They stole the election from Trump and you know that you scum bag and you fucking too bad it didn't beat the shit out of you more.

I did. When did you start to change your mind? What changed? Well, I guess for those of you that have gotten to know me or know my personality, I mean I was definitely attracted to Donald Trump's bombastic approach to politics.

I read that Washington Post article where they wrote about how he learned Donald Trump's favorite starburst and then he like assembled a jar full of like handpicked the I think it's the pink ones or his favorite pink and something else and he hand picks out of this giant bag of starburst and then puts it in a jar and flies down to Mar-a-Lago and gives it to Donald Trump.

And I found this as I was researching my own book, the wives often carry the scars, even in a way their husbands don't.

Doll's books and not just his books but his memoirs, Boy and Going Solo which are great and I highly recommend to anyone who hasn't read those real life stories because they give you a real sense of where Roald Dahl was coming from.

This is not one of those Donald Trump books. It's like, Orange Man Bad, which he has 200 pages. And we're out. This is deep, deep research about his finances.

We were able to get to that figure because as part of the reporting for that story, Mary Trump who is Donald Trump's niece provided us with more than 100,000 pages of documents that just opened up a door that we never thought we would, a room we would ever get into into Fred Trump's wealth and she had all this information.

He got a ton of money and he's still... So George Costanza situation, like if you believe it, it becomes true type of thing with Trump.

That's Donald Trump's magic, right? A lie repeated over and over he hopes becomes fact.

It's still going on, there's no small time builder here. There's no, oh I just got a small loan and it was all me.