This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the

third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm David Rothkoff,

your host, coming to you from Washington, D.C. And we are very pleased to have a friend of ours with

us today. Mary Trump, who you know as an author of bestselling books, a host of great podcasts,

and now, as I understand it, and I'll get to this in a minute, part-time romance novelist,

I don't really quite understand that, but I'm very open-minded. Hi, Mary, how are you?

Hey, David, it's really good to see you and your new digs. New digs? Well, it's just, you know,

it's a bit, you know, my wife's working in Washington, so I will, too, for a while.

So, let's get to this thing. You guys are writing a romance novel. I just, you know, we can get

to serious politics in a second, but what's that about? Yeah, let's get this out of the way for

it. Honestly, the really short version is that a bunch of us became friends via Zoom during

COVID, and somebody came up with this idea of writing a hallmark movie together because they're

particularly fond of hallmark movies, and it was just a way for us to sort of be creative and get

through the second, third and fourth lockdowns, and like I've never seen a hallmark movie and I

never want to, but I'm happy to write one. And in it, I'm not working out, and then I thought,

I was having serious writers block. So, you know, let's write a romance novel instead,

and we'll serialize it on sub-stack. And I've never read a romance novel either, but I've been

writing fiction since I was 12, so it's totally in my wheelhouse. And to be fair, I'm not entirely

sure, it can be categorized as a romance novel, although there's romantic stuff in it, but it

sends it up. It's me, E. Jean Carroll, Gentile, and it's just really fun, honestly. It's a break from

the stuff you and I have to deal with 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Well, you guys are all

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