Hey dude I didn't know until I started I didn't know until I started researching just a little bit today and I told you I was not going to do the normal amount of research that I do before a podcast.

Because I just asked you like last night

if you could do sort of an emergency pod with me.

But you're a fiction writer, you were a fiction writer first,

and a highly regarded short story writer which is a form that I absolutely love so I can't wait to dive into your fiction man I just haven't read it.

Oh thanks man it's it's been a really weird few years. You know, I actually, I didn't really get a start in politics until 2015, 2016 when I started going to all these Trump rallies sort of as a way to not work on a failed novel and you know it was like I had this

novel that had ballooned up to like 550 pages with no end in sight and I was like I need to do something to get my mind off this because I'm not good being idle.

And so, you know, like any normal person, I started going into Trump rallies and I started

realizing in these Trump rallies that like there was something really ugly

fasturing in the country and I never expected that it would take over my life for the next

four or five years I had no clue I was going to end up in this place.

Well I'll say, and hey this is the moment, I'm Brian Koppelman, thanks for listening.

My guest today is Jared Yates Sexton. If you don't know who he is, he's a terrific, a terrific thinker and writer, a professor, and has

studied this phenomenon of Trumpism, but it seems to have stoked a curiosity in him that led him to study

the history of our democracy and his latest book, American Rule, really talks about the ways

in which this was predicted, but also the ways in which what we're worried about now has kind of happened at various times during our nation's history and but as I started to say here I didn't realize you were a fiction writer first.

And since you are, and since you're a well-read person, it's funny, I went back today and I read the first,

like 10 pages, the view from Mrs. Thompson's, you know, the Wallace piece and which was

written right after 9-11 and was about this sort of coming together this the idea that the American flag didn't have to be one

sides and that there was a way to sort of find common ground in certain core values. But the way you, it seems to me the way you think

about this, those core values even are another mirage that this is all

exposing. Yeah, I had to... other mirage that this is all exposing?

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