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I'm Megna Chachrabardi and this is the jackpot where on point news analyst Jack Beaty

helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now.

Hello there Jack.

Hello Megna.

Episode 25 today, what's your headline?

The Xanadu effect. Now if you're going to be linking poetry and

politics today Jack I'm going to be over the moon so what do we mean by the Xanadu

effect this week? Indeed it named after Coleridge's famous poem, you know, beginning in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, the Xanadu effect is a peculiar kind of nemesis to mix mythologies, laid up for presidents who lose touch and come to inhabit their own semi-private worlds.

Here's looking at you, Donald Trump.

But as we're going to see, also most acutely with Joe Biden. In his 1970 book, the twilight of the

presidency, George Reedy, who was one of L.B.JJ's press secretaries and who saw the Xanadu effect in full

operation wrote the most important and least examined problem of the presidency is that of maintaining contact with reality.

He points to the apparatus of hangers-on and sycophants and yes men who cocoon the president as

presidents really become captive to their inner circles no one he, he writes, thrusts unpleasant thoughts upon a king unless

asked to do so. And the king reference gets at the peculiar nature of the president.

He's both the head of government, but also the head of state, the sort of embodiment of

...