Hey, everybody. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. I taped this show with George Packer

earlier in the week. I talked about his new book and some bigger picture themes about state

of affairs in the country and the maybe waning, I don't know, the quasi emergency that we're in.

And so I hope you guys enjoy it. I Hope you have a wonderful and restful holiday.

And I'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Kristol.

But stick around for my conversation with George Packer. Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

He's the author of numerous books, including The Assassins Gate and Last Best Hope, America

and Crisis and Renewal. His latest book is a novel,

The Emergency, which was published this month. It's George Packer. How you doing, man?

Hey, good to see you, Tim. Welcome back. Happy Thanksgiving. What does the Packer family Thanksgiving

look like? Do you have any feuds, any political feuds, any old, old rivalries that come to the

four? Is it all joy? Do you have a annual soccer tournament?

You know, we don't have a tradition. I mean, we've lost three parents in the last three years. So our kids, yeah, it is. And our kids' sense of the bigger family has really shrunk. So they're basically stuck with their parents this Thanksgiving.

But our son has been at college. We're really looking forward to having him home. But it's going to be a

really small Thanksgiving. But I'm going to try to make it special with a capon, which is a castrated

chicken. There may be some listeners who are going to object, but it's, you know,

it's all okay by the authorities, I think. And it just tastes better than chicken.

Got it. A castrated chicken. I'm trying to think about who the political figure would be that would

best fit that bill this week. Maybe Mike Johnson. I don't know. Because it's sort of a chicken chicken, right? Yeah, right. A chicken chicken, chicken, I'll pray on that. Maybe at the end of the pot, I'll have a more apt. Mike Johnson is my initial nominee. Okay. I want to start here. I want to get to the book, because the book very much, I started reading it on the plane earlier this weekend. I'll confess I'm not done, but, you know, I've done enough as a podcast host to, I put in a good faith effort, given all the things out there. So we'll get to the book, which touches on a lot of our current themes. But just first, really quick, at like the broadest level, we're 10 months in, 11 months

in, really, to Trump 2.0. It's been a minute since we've talked. What's your take? I saw a

...