Can a Celebrity Be Conservative? How Pop Culture Is Shifting in Trump’s America

Popcast

The New York Times

Music Interviews, Music Commentary, Music

3.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From Sydney Sweeney to Taylor Swift and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a conversation with the columnist Ross Douthat about how culture is reacting to a second Trump administration. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the New York Times Popcast. You are interrupting my pardon of weekly cultural review.
0:10.6	I'm John Caramonica and I'm the critic. I'm Joe Cascarlli and I'm the reporter.
0:14.4	It's a special episode today. Big theme conversation, big ideas. No knock on our other guests guests but we had a big thought you and i
0:24.7	were texting a couple weeks ago sidney sweeney the memes the discourse sending tweets back and
0:33.7	forth um can a celebrity be conservative this is something that we talk about and we allude to a lot on this show.
0:41.1	And I think we determined that it was time for a real episode on the topic.
0:44.6	This is something that I think has threaded through a lot of our thoughts and coverage for the last couple of years.
0:51.9	This has been a moment in which pop culture is changing a lot. The center
0:57.3	of what I think the American mainstream is, has moved in alignment with the current
1:05.2	presidential administration. And there was basically one person we wanted to chat with about
1:10.7	this.
1:11.1	Literally just one.
1:12.0	And he happened to reside professionally in the same building as us.
1:16.8	Ross Southett is here on Popcast.
1:19.4	Ross is the host of Interesting Times with Ross Douthit.
1:22.4	Ross is a opinion columnist at the New York Times.
1:25.3	You guys needed us needed to know if a celebrity could be a conservative. And here we are. And here I am. That's our show. That's it. That's a show. That's great. Yeah. We're over. This is a crossover episode. It's multiple senses. Like a Marvel team up kind of. Yes. Flintstones meet the Jetsons. That's my go-to.
1:46.3	I'm the Flintstone.
1:50.6	I was going to say that's a pretty late in comparison.
1:53.3	I was not going to go with it. We'll decide by the end.
1:54.1	But Ross, we've been on parallel journeys not only as New York Times employees, but as video podcasting experimenters.
2:03.7	Ross has a YouTube channel.
	...

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