Steve Hayes & Damon Linker: The Hole Truth
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steve Hayes and Damon Linker debate whether Trump's demolition of the White House East Wing is another norm-busting outrage or just a gaudy renovation. They argue over visuals versus substance in anti-Trump outrage, Trump's manipulation of public opinion, and whether Congress's abdication of power is the true engine of American authoritarian drift. Then: could "Trump 2028" be both a joke and a trial balloon? And in Goat Grinders: the "harm-reduction community," the literal misuse of a certain word, and liberal tolerance of urban squalor.
Produced by Corey Wara
Production Coordinator Ashley Khan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Tuesday, October 28th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:07.8 | It's the gist I'm Mike Pesca. |
| 0:09.9 | And today, quite shockingly, is a not even mad day. |
| 0:12.6 | Why? |
| 0:13.3 | Because we decided it would be such. |
| 0:16.1 | And there are so many things happening in the world that we had to get two very learned men together who I was |
| 0:22.3 | surprised didn't know each other. Steve Hayes of the dispatch and Damon Linker. They both been on the |
| 0:26.9 | show before. Damon Linker teaches at UPenn and writes notes from the middle ground. If you listen to the |
| 0:31.6 | Sam Harris podcast, he was on it. He's a very, very smart guy. He really talks about the dangers of democracy slipping away. |
| 0:39.3 | Guess what? |
| 0:40.2 | That comes up obliquely and then directly in our talk. |
| 0:44.3 | So of the things, this just tells you where we are. |
| 0:47.9 | We have to get to the important, huge, overriding issues of the day. |
| 0:52.6 | We don't discuss the shutdown. |
| 0:54.9 | This is not a dereliction of duty. |
| 0:57.2 | There is some stuff to say about the shutdown, but the shutdown, though unbelievably important |
| 1:01.9 | and is, if there's not a hurricane, one or two in every newscast, though important is |
| 1:06.8 | maybe not as fundamental as, say, blowing up boats in the Caribbean, which we also don't |
| 1:12.7 | get to. |
| 1:13.6 | Not really. |
| 1:14.6 | And the Insurgency Act and much about ICE agents on the streets of various cities, Chicago, |
| 1:20.8 | is the one that's bothering me most of all. |
... |
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