← The Good Fight
The Good Fight
The Good Fight Club: The “Trump Is Dead” Conspiracy, the Big Summit Between Xi, Putin and Modi, and Firings at the CDC
01:02:29
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- [00:00]
A
In this post Pizzagate world, anything is possible. This is a huge and potent new weapon for the power seekers who have always resented the world of facts, the stubbornness of facts, and who've always wanted to obliterate facts. And now it's easier than ever to do that.
- [00:26]
B
As some of you know, we have been experimenting with a new format on this podcast, the Good Fight Club panel discussion about everything wonderful and often not so wonderful that has happened in the world in the last week and the feedback so far has been really positive. A lot of you have been tuning in to these episodes and I've gotten a lot of very nice emails encouraging us to continue going with this. So for the next month at least, we're going to be doing one of these every week. So we now have three episodes of a podcast every week, two episodes interview episodes, and one good Fight Club. I will leave the whole of this conversation on paywall this week, but starting in the next weeks, we are often going to put the last of the three segments each week behind a paywall. So if you want to make sure that you don't miss any part of these really fun conversations, please go to yashamonk substack.com and become a paying subscriber. And please make sure if you haven't already, that you have added this podcast, ideally the private feed to which you get access ad free if you're a paying subscriber to your favorite podcasting app and tell your friends about this fun new format that the podcast has to help see you sanely through an increasingly insane world. Thank you for listening. And now, the Good Fight with Yasha Monk. Welcome to the third installment of the Good Fight Club with my regular co conspirator and co host Francis Foul Fukuyama. Welcome, Frank.
- [02:17]
C
Thanks, Jasa.
- [02:20]
B
With Mona Charan, who was part of our inaugural episode, who is a staff writer at the Bulwark and who hosts the Mona Charan Podcast. Welcome Mona.
- [02:32]
D
Glad to be here.
- [02:34]
B
And with my friend and sometime co teacher Russell Muhlhat, who is a professor of government at Dartmouth College and as well as a representative for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives in New Hampshire. Welcome Russ.
- [02:51]
A
Delighted to be here. Thank you, Yasha.
- [02:54]
B
You know, I thought I'd start with a subject that speaks to your interests, Russ, and to a book you wrote a number of years ago with Nancy Rosenbloom called A Lot of People are Saying because over the last days a big portion of the Internet became convinced that Donald Trump was either in a very serious health crisis or possibly dead There was a few days in which he didn't hold a press conference in which he wasn't seen in public. And this rumor immediately took off in a big part of the online world. It's kind of remarkable that we're now in a moment in which so little suffices to convince so many people of so such a vast conspiracy that, by the way, would be destined to fail within days in any case, because how long can you hide the death of a US President? What do you make of this?
- [03:46]
A
Amazing, isn't it? He disappears from view for three days. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. By Saturday, millions of people think he's dead. And posts all over, posts all over, from Blue sky to X to Truth Social, sometimes from his enemies, but often from his own fans wondering whether the guy is still alive. And yeah, it shows like how little it takes to get a conspiracy. It's not a theory, just a conspiratorial concoction going today in our politics. You think about the old conspiracy, real theories, how much work it took to make the case that JF there wasn't one lone gunman in the JFK assassination. People had researched that for years. They wrote huge books, they imitated scholars and investigative journalists with footnotes and, and what's his name? They were pedantic. They were pedantic. And now it takes nothing because of this new technology that we've been dancing with for the past decade in our politics and in the world where anyone can say anything to everybody in the world for free, in this post Pizzagate world, anything is possible. This is a huge and potent new weapon for the power seekers who have always resented the world of facts, the stubbornness of facts, and who've always wanted to obliterate facts and now, you know, it's easier than ever to do that.
- [05:03]
D
Oh, that was beautifully said. Can I just jump in real quick, Yasha, on that point? And it's just to say that all of that is exactly right. But I would just add one thing that is possibly unique to Trump, and that is that he is the master of dominating the airwaves, the airspace, people's brains, and he is just this avalanche of content all the damn time. And so for him to go quiet, even for 24 hours is a little bit not what people are expecting. And so I think in this case, it gave rise to rumors very, very quickly because he has those tendencies.
- [05:46]
A
Yeah, I am so with you, Mona. I mean, the. Because another thing is just like the nature of celebrity and you know, when you have, when there's, when you're into a celebrity. You know, you follow everything about the celebrity you consume, every little tidbit you can find it. You want to know what they have for breakfast, how they take their coffee. And today's celebrities, they're feeding the beast constantly. You know, they're tweeting constantly, they're dripping out little details constantly. And Trump knows how to do this. He knows how to do it better than any other leader in the history of the United States of America. And yeah, the guy goes silent for three days and his fans are starved. The monster of celebrity is starved for nourishment. He must be dead. And I think there's also just like something in the nature of a celebrity where, you know, the kind of connection that when our political leaders are celebrities, the kind of connection you have with them is on one hand, they're sitting in the room with you, you know, you know them, you feel them, they're your friend. On the other hand, you don't actually have a living, breathing human being with you. They are kind of just images, which is why, like, you know, there was rumors that Franklin Roosevelt was dead and had a body double, Paul McCartney. Paul is dead. For years in the late 1960s, I. And celebrities have always danced with this where on one hand, their fans feel like they're right there in the room with them. On the other hand, they're kind of dead to their fans. And as a consequence, they have to constantly feed the sense that they're alive, feed their fans appetite, and there's no end to it. So, yeah, Trump took three days off. He must be dead.
- [07:13]
B
How important is this conspiracism and how new is it? You. You know, when you look at politics today, it's so awash in this kind of stuff, and it does seem to come so close to power that it's very easy to think that this is super important. And then you go back and, you know, before the rise of the Internet, 10% of Americans thought that the moon landing was fake. All the conspiracy theories about JFK that Russ mentioned have been around for a long time. The Bircher Society was awash with conspiracy theories in the 1960s. Frank, help us think about how to put this in historical perspective. Is there something really new here, or is this just the dark shadow of American politics since the inception of the American Republic?
- [07:57]
C
Well, it's always been around in some form or another. But I actually wrote a little blog piece about this that it's very much related to the contemporary rise of populism, because really, the essence of populism is to believe in a conspiracy. That populist believes that there are elites that are manipulating the visible world that we have taken for granted. They've taken the red pill, and they see now that everything is actually fake. And I think that that's really come to define modern conservatism rather than any coherent set of ideas about small government or deregulation or foreign policy. It is the idea that we are the victims of hidden elites, that the things that we have taken for granted, like facts on legacy media, are actually false and they are intended to harm our interests. And I think that that's new. I mean, there was always a fringe that believed that, but I think that the. And I really do think that technology is also heavily implicated in all of this, because there were not that many communications channels by which ideas could spread that easily before the rise of the Internet. And today anybody can be a publisher. And you've seen this change in qualifications for credibility, where it spread from, you know, having come from certain institutions that were commonly accepted as credible sources to basically the number of likes and retweets that a particular meme or idea gets. So that's the sense in which I think things are, you know, are different now.
- [09:54]
D
And it's pushed into people's phones now. Whereas before, if you were interested in the ideas of the John Birch Society, you had to subscribe to a newsletter that would come to your house every fortnight or something and actually spend money and put yourself out there. Now the conspiracies just arrive, and you can just scroll right through them.
- [10:17]
B
Yeah, and you can start with something reasonable and very quickly be pushed towards more extreme stuff on YouTube, et cetera, as is well documented. Russ, you have this argument that somehow the nature of conspiracy is different, but the new conspiracism is just different in kind from the kind of conspiracies we got before. What do you mean by that?
- [10:37]
A
You know, I think, as Frank said, like, any time there's a kind of promise that the people rule, there's going to be a kind of invitation to conspiracy, because the people are going to wonder, well, if we rule, how come we're not ruling? How come there are these other people standing between us and power, deliberating and voting and making decisions. And so there will always be some sort of elite that, even if it's acting in good faith, Stan mediates popular rule, and that invites conspiratorial thinking. The Declaration of Independence is a conspiracy theory. Massive conspiracies. Abraham Lincoln was a conspiracy theorist. There's a long history of conspiracy theory. Usually it's trying to explain something, and usually it's trying to explain something that's just genuinely hard to understand. How do 19 people with no resources plotting from the sands of a failed state, Afghanistan. How do they successfully attack the United States of America? And the Pentagon in New York City for the first time in over a century, how does that happen? It doesn't seem possible. The cause is so puny. The effect is world historical. People want to see a cause that's proportional to the effect, and so they start imagining the US Government must have been in on that. And that's the 9, 11 conspiracies. It's explaining something. But this stuff that post Pizzagate, what is Pizzagate explaining? There's no event that's hard to explain. You know, it's. It's just that what Pizzagate does, the way it functions is it. Is. It brands somebody like Hillary Clinton as evil as a Nazi. This is someone who traffic. Sexually traffics in children, according to Pizzagate. And so though, you know, it makes your person. Donald Trump, who's flawed. Well, okay, he's flawed, but he's not evil like she is. She's. She's a criminal. She should be imprisoned. So it functions to delegitimate the opposition. It doesn't function to explain. It's much more of a partisan political tool than the kind of, you know, you might call it classic conspiracies that's really been around for centuries.
- [12:42]
D
And in the case of Trump supporters, it supplies a psychological need because as Russell said, they know that he is a bad guy in many respects, somebody that they themselves say they wouldn't want, you know, to babysit their children. On the other hand, they do support him, and therefore they would be morally compromised if they didn't think that Hillary Clinton, and in fact, the entire Democratic Party was a. Was the work of the devil. And therefore, when it's. When they're the work of the devil, well, then Trump doesn't look as bad.
- [13:17]
A
Yeah, it erases all ambivalence. I mean, just picking up what Mona was just saying, when Nancy Rosenblum and I were finishing this book, a lot of people are saying on the. What we call the new conspiracies, we're sending the manuscript out. You know, there's that lag before it comes out. And we said to each other, gosh, what if this whole thing goes away by the time the book comes out, we kind of worried that we were. Yeah, we were like, plucking stuff from the Wackadoo, you know, periphery of American politics and, and, you know, and ours in our subtitle we have the assault on democracy, like where we had we just driven ourselves to the state of disequilibrium. Like, have we lost our interpretive senses by focusing too much on really crazy stuff? And I remember we said to each other, well, look, if it all disappears, it'll be bad for our book and good for the country. Let's not worry. And then January 6th and the fake election, the rigged election conspiracy, which Trump first started playing with after the Iowa caucus in 2016, you know, it explained every election he lost and it seemed preposterous, too preposterous to take seriously, ends up, you know, generating January 6th and ends up giving us a president who literally tries to overturn an election result. So, I mean, yes, this is like the old conspiracy stuff. It tries to explain. And you know what else? Sometimes it's true. That's the other thing about conspiracy theories. Like in the 1970s, you know, 60s, if people had said, the US government is giving LSD to American citizens to experiment with mind control, that's nuts. The U.S. government would never do that. Of course it did do that. It was revealed at the program MKUltra. I mean, to read it is to walk into a crazy world. But it happened. Some conspiracy theories are true. And that's the thing about an explanatory theory. There's a lot of explanatory theories about Jeff Epstein today. It's really hard for me to understand lots of stuff about that, about Jeff Epstein. And it's not surprising to me that people come up with conspiracy theories to explain it. That's a kind of function.
- [15:28]
B
Well, I think Mona spoke a little while ago about the psychological needs that are served by a conspiracy theory. And one is just the need to have an explanation for something that seems puzzling. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all of this money? How could this band of people in the sands of Afghanistan bring down the World Trade Center? But another I think, is that there's a weird tension in conspiracy theories between the fact that they seemingly posit a very hostile world. The terrible people are in charge and they're doing terrible things to us, and you have to be very afraid. But they also promise a kind of easy deliverance because what they're actually saying is, and if only we were able to displace the 27 evil people who are running the world and put normal people in the place of them, then we could fix everything, then we could solve everything. When the Actual truth is much more complicated, which is that nobody really runs the world. Nobody has the power to do all of that. And that's in some ways a much more scary thought.
- [16:32]
D
Yeah. And Yasha, can I ask you a question because you follow closely European politics, and it strikes me that another difference between conspiracy theories today and what we've had in the past in the United States is that they've always been with us, of course, but they've never been mainstreamed. Never. Until now. Now they are being promoted and promulgated by people in power. And that is not true in Europe. Right. I mean, so I'd be curious how you've. Yeah. What, what would you.
- [17:10]
B
Yeah, it depends on how you define the European mainstream, I think. I mean, it is interesting, but I think conspiracy theory does seem to be closely associated with populism on, on, on, on the left, when you look at people like Will Chavez and someone who is a complete conspiracy theorist.
- [17:28]
D
Right.
- [17:28]
B
But, but also particularly on the right. And I would say that all of the right wing populist parties in Europe are similarly conspiratorial to Trump and MAGA World. Now, they're not quite as mainstream yet in the sense that in Germany and France and Britain they don't yet govern, but of course, in those three countries they are leading in the polls, or in some polls at least. So they're just about less mainstream. But it's not because the equivalent political space is less conspiratorial, it's that the equivalent political space, less, doesn't quite have as much power yet.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, I appreciate that. I think you put your finger on something, that conspiracy reflects a deep yearning to inhabit a world that we can control and make safe and make right, and that we're not vulnerable to, you know, impersonal forces that are well beyond human control. And that's, I think, always there.
- [18:25]
B
And this, of course, was part of what happened for the last week because a lot of it was, you know, we see obviously how strongly a lot of Maga World is imbued in conspiracy theory. But in this case, there was also a lot of people on the left thinking, hoorah, Trump is dead, problem solved. Right. And that also, of course, was a reassuring thought for many people on Blue sky and so on, so forth.
- [18:43]
D
I did, I did see a funny post that I have to repeat on Blue Sky. Someone said, well, I don't know if Trump is ill or not, but if he is ill, I hope he's getting medical advice from RFK Jr
- [18:59]
B
well, that seems as good a time as any to close this segment. So a bigger story that has gone on for the last days, but I thought perhaps we can start with a little bit of levity, is the remarkable summit and the remarkable set of meetings between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and even Daniel Andrews. Not the leader of the Labour Party in Australia, but the former premier of the state of Victoria and the leader of the Labour Party in Victoria. An extraordinary set of meetings between the leaders of China and Russia and India and North Korea, who have had significant differences, many of whom are in the midst of significant territorial disputes with each other, but who seem to have been driven to at least some form of alliance in part by the current American administration. Frank, how significant is this moment? Is this the start of a kind of global realignment?
- [20:04]
C
Well, I think you need to pick apart a couple of different strands in what you just described. The first one is the creation of a anti democratic axis. At the time of the Iraq war, we talked about an axis of evil, but it wasn't a real axis. It was just a lumping together of three countries that we didn't like. But it's become a real axis. And this is something that has preceded the Trump administration. This started with Chinese support for the Russian war effort. They don't give them weapons, but they do provide a lot of material for Russia's military industrial base. And then you had North Korea sending actual troops to serve on the front lines in Ukraine. You have Iran providing drones and drone making technology to Russia. And so that is a level of cooperation among these authoritarian actors that goes way beyond anything that we've seen. And I think that is a really important, significant development. And it's very bad because we always had NATO and a lot of allies, but they always had these informal networks. But now they're developing something I think much more durable. But it's a separate issue about US Indian relations, which I think is one of the most idiotic stories I could possibly imagine. So I would point to this New York Times article that came out a few days ago explaining why, why Trump wanted to impose 50% tariffs on India. And it's so typical.
- [21:48]
B
And the article, by the way, reads like a conspiracy theory to link back to the first segment of the show. I mean, it's such an absurd explanation. Can this really be it? But apparently it is. So why, Frank, why is it that this very strong relationship that India Midalis has had for a very long time is now on the rock? Because. Why?
- [22:06]
C
Yeah. Well, it makes no sense. Because for years, including in the previous Trump administration. And early on in this Trump administration, India was seen as a really important strategic counterweight to China because they've got very serious border issues. They actually killed each other's soldiers in an incident a few years ago. There's a huge competition. TikTok is banned in India and so forth. And so the strategic imperative of aligning with India on the part of the United States was something that was well understood by everybody. Now, according to this New York Times story, the reason that Trump imposed this 50% tariff was that he wants to win a Nobel Prize. And he had a conversation with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, in which he talked about, you know, he was boasting about his having settled the conflict that India had with Pakistan a couple months ago. Modi was really bristled at this because for a number of reasons, because, first of all, it wasn't true. They settled this issue on their own. They didn't need American mediation. But it also, you know, shows complete ignorance of what India is about. They bristle at any idea that a third party is needed to help them solve their regional problems. And so it's something that, you know, prickly Indians would never accept, except that Trump wanted to claim credit for it. And by insisting that he had played an important role, Modi basically hung up the phone and said, well, screw you. Didn't actually say that, but in effect, that was response. And Trump got so angry at this. He apparently had been nominated for the Nobel Prize by Pakistan, and he foolishly thought that India might join in with this. And when Modi refused to do this, all of a sudden they get 50% tariffs. And the ostensible reason that they were buying Russian oil was just nonsense. So it's just a perfect encapsulation of what's wrong with Trump that he places his personal vanity and his personal regard way ahead of any kind of strategic interest, including an interest that's been well understood by Republicans, Democrats. It's something dictated by the global geopolitical situation, but he doesn't care. But. But it also says something about the alliance, because if you notice, Modi was missing from all the pictures that came out the next day about the big military parade. I don't think he was at that ceremony there. They had all these Central Asian leaders, and Kim Jong Un was there, and Putin was there, but not Modi. And I don't think that this, you know, I don't think that India is going to join this coalition. They're just pissed off at the United States right now. For understandable reasons, but they still have a really big problem with China. And I think that that strategic conflict is really going to mean that India will never become a member in good standing of this anti democratic coalition. So I wouldn't worry about that aspect. I would worry about the coalition itself, though, because founding members are still there and they're still very dangerous.
- [25:44]
A
What I think is really incisive there, among your other points, Frank, is that this is personal. It's not about policy. Trump tweets China's conspiring against the United States as if he's just made this discovery that. And I think what's really going on is he is so upset that he wasn't invited to this parade. You know, he. That's basically what's what he's. That's what his reaction is all about. He wasn't there. He is. He's left out, and he's feeling really slighted and insulted. This is a party. He loves parades, he loves military parades, and he loves Putin and shit.
- [26:22]
B
It's my favorite type of party. Why are you not inviting me?
- [26:24]
A
When he looks out at the world like what this man wants, he's driven by power. Healthy, normal people, you know, they want others, lots of things. They may or may not be perfect about pursuing them, but Trump wants power. And when he looks out at the world, he sees the two people who are more powerful than him, Putin and Xi, and he wants to be like them, and he thinks that they will like him. This is where he's weak. He thinks because he's like them, because he's similar to them in his love of power, they will appreciate him and they will admire him, too, and be his friends and his friends, these two people whose friendship and camaraderie, like the fawning, gushing red carpet embrace that he gave to Putin, you know, in Alaska, this was his buddy, and he's being locked out. He's being frozen out. So I think it's very personal. We don't have a tariff policy. We have a person whose mood determines our tariffs. We don't have a foreign policy. We have a person who, you know, decides from day to day what to do against the, say, India or for India or with India. There's no policy.
- [27:34]
D
So this is this tableau of all of these leaders assembling at the call of Xi Jinping. So you had Lukashenko of Belarus, and you had the leader of Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Vietnam. Vietnam had been leaning toward us. And of course, most importantly, Modi, who presides over what the Third or fourth largest economy in the world, which is only growing. I mean, China is actually losing population. India is still growing. India is an incredibly important country which, as has already been said on this podcast, five US Presidents have been attempting to court and cajole and bring on side to be a strong American ally as a counterweight to China. All of these countries now assemble in China and they seem to be receptive. And it's because of the absolute failure of Trump to be anything resembling a rational actor that China, this authoritarian, thuggish regime, is making a credible case that, you know what, we are the anchor of stability in the world. Now, you know, you may not like us, you know, we're a little bit mercantilist and, you know, repressive, but we're not all over the map. We, you, you know what to expect with us. You know, as soon as Trump imposed sanctions and insulted the leader of South Africa, China jumped in and, and, and offered free trade for a year with South Africa. I mean, they are nimble. They are recognizing that here is an opportunity to do what they've been longing to do for the, for a very long, long while, which is to replace the United States as the global hegemon, as the global leader. And you know, it is, Putin was explicit about it at this meeting. He said to Xi Jinping that there is a, that the role of world leader is currently not being occupied. He said it's indefinite, wink, wink. And so I do think, Yasha, in response to what you said, is this the turning point? Well, it may very well be because Trump is an infant. He is a pathological narcissist who was only interested in what is personally good for him. And he had this fantasy that he was going to be getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And Pakistan said, sure, we'll nominate you. And India said no. And so American policy, BAM is let's impose 50% sanctions on India, a country that by any other calculation of national interests should be our ally. And so, yeah, Trump is turning us into a third rate power and the country that is benefiting from it the most is China.
- [30:38]
B
I think it is a really interesting insight that Trump sees himself in strongman because he aspires to political power. And this was remarkable in his first term in power and it continues to be remarkable now. I mean, he tends to be close to El Sisi in Egypt, to MbS in Saudi Arabia.
- [30:58]
D
Duterte, he loved Duterte.
- [31:01]
B
He loved Duterte back in the day. I mean, these are all people who have very little in common with each other, other than that, the authoritarian figures. But what I hadn't thought about is that actually a lot of these strongmen leaders around the world are motivated by other things. They might be motivated by nationalism, they might be motivated by a religious form of allegiance. They might be motivated by their regional rivalries. And so the fact that Trump sees himself in them does not mean that they see themselves in him. And one of the things that I find very striking, talking about, insofar as that is still possible these days to people in China who have some amount of influence and perhaps political power, is that they kind of fall into the trap that would make our friend Garry Kasparov very angry. Namely, when people say that Trump is playing three dimensional chess. He always says he's not even playing chess, he's playing checkers. But I think to a lot of the observers in China, they're looking at Trump and they're thinking, our political system is so careful and so choreographed and so structured and so hierarchical. It's impossible that somebody like Trump is as haphazard as he appears to be. There must be something more to it. And I think that Xi Jinping is sort of, you know, he does not see himself in Trump because he sees Trump as his antidote in many of those kind of ways. He says, I don't quite understand what's going on. There might be more to it than meets the eye, but whatever that is, that is the opposite of what I am. So Trump sees himself in them, they don't see themselves in him. I do wonder whether Trump's feeling betrayed by this party to which he wasn't invited might have one silver lining, which is that perhaps it will push him away from Vladimir Putin a little bit. Perhaps he'll think, I rode out the red carpet for Putin and the literal red carpet for Putin in Alaska, and I thought this would get us somewhere. And then two weeks later, he holds this big party and I'm not invited. Now, you know, he keeps going back and forth and flip flopping in Ukraine in a million ways. But I wonder whether that will at least be one kind of little factor pushing Trump away from Putin rather than towards him.
- [33:16]
C
Not sure that that's going to be all that important. The one thing that's pretty clear about his foreign policy is that he does not like Putin. Any kind of use of hard power. The most he's done is vaguely threaten Putin with secondary sanctions, but the idea that you'd actually up the supply of weapons that would get Russians killed. He's just not at all been interested in that. And the way he came, everybody was speculating for about a month that maybe he really was going to turn against Putin. But that all just disappeared in a moment. I think that anyone peak he has with China for not being invited is also going to disappear if he thinks that he can get a deal with China. And I think that they've been planning, hoping for a summit. They let China off the hook on the trade negotiations because they hadn't realized that the Chinese had this ace up their sleeve in the form of the rare earths embargo. And I think that it's still completely possible that this fall they'll come to another understanding that will allow Trump to declare victory and he'll go to Beijing and say that he's secured peace in our time. I think that's more likely than any kind of permanent estrangement between Trump and either Putin or Xi.
- [34:47]
D
Yasha, what I hear you saying is that please, God, let maybe his wounded pride somehow work for our good, you know, if nothing else, you know, because we know he's such a baby and therefore maybe that will have some beneficial effects. But we have to remember that Putin, since the start of Trump, too, has repeatedly put his thumb in Trump's eye, you know, promised to stop the bombing and promised to negotiate and told Trump privately apparently, that he really wants peace, only to obviously renege on all of that. And Trump has said, well, I'm very angry at Putin, remember, several times.
- [35:33]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [35:34]
B
And some of the anger always dissipates somehow.
- [35:37]
D
It always does. So.
- [35:39]
C
And she, by the way, another thing that Putin's been doing is showing nude pictures of Melania on Russian tv. It's funny that this has not gotten well covered in the United States, but, yeah, there's lots of ways that he's digging at Trump.
- [35:57]
A
I didn't know that. Yeah, I mean, Xi, too, like back in February, March, Trump was desperate for the Chinese to come engage in bilateral negotiations. Everybody's coming to me. Everybody wants a deal. Well, the China wasn't coming. They totally froze out U.S. trade negotiators. And Trump was just desperate. He was begging them, begging them, and they were ignoring him. And this is like China saying, look, they're very clearly telling Trump that they're not worried about provoking him, they're not afraid of him.
- [36:31]
B
We will have many more reasons to return to the international scene in the upcoming episodes of A Good Fight Club. But, Mona, you suggested rightly that we should focus as one of our segments for this week on the extraordinary developments in public health, in the NIH and particularly in the cdc. Give us a little bit of an overview of where we're at. We obviously have RFK Jr.
- [37:02]
A
You know,
- [37:02]
B
in charge of that part of the administration. You know, in the same way in which some people thought in 2016 that Trump, you know, might grow into his office and, you know, turn into an adult, perhaps some people thought that somehow power would restrict what RFK Jr. Is going to do. But that does not seem to be the case. He is firing people left and right. He is revising vaccine guidance not just for Covid boosters for adults, but looking into the link, supposed link between autism and vaccines and other things for which there's just no scientific basis. Where are we at in this story and how should we be thinking about it?
- [37:47]
D
Well, yeah, you framed it exactly right that people persuaded themselves that RFK Jr. In in power wouldn't be as crazy or as extreme as RFK Jr. Throughout the last 60 years of his life has been. And that was the willing suspension of disbelief. And unfortunately in the first Trump term there was some reason to think that the adult voices prevailed on some things. But there was no reason to believe that in a second term where he was reelected that that would be the case. And sure enough, people like Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a doctor from Louis, he's from Louisiana, he's a doctor himself and he was a key vote to confirm RFK Jr having extracted promises during hearing that RFK would not do anything crazy about vaccine because he's been an anti vaccine campaigner for his whole career. Partly that's been personally remunerative to him, partly cause they sue vaccine makers and drug companies. But what we have now is the full scale assault on, not just on vaccines. And by the way, you mentioned the so called link between vaccines and autism. It's not just that he's looking into it. He has created a panel of experts that is completely stocked with his own lunatic conspiracist, anti science people who will deliver a pre digested conclusion, first evidence, second report that will say there is a link because that's what these people have been doing their whole lives. Then that will then get the imprimatur of HHS declaring that they have discovered a link and here is the work and therefore who knows knows what that means about the future availability of the MMR vaccine which saves countless lives of children every year. And it is part of a wholesale assault on public health in this country. Just today as we're recording this, about a thousand present and past employees of HHS have signed a letter saying that RFK Jr needs to be fired for the sake of the health of all, all of us. You had the high profile firing of the head of CDC who was only appointed 28 days previous and several other high ranking CDC officials resigned with her. When you're looking, America is descending unbelievably rapidly to third world status. And when you search for a comparison to this kind of thing, embracing witch doctorism basically at the largest health organization in the country, the nearest recent historical example comes from the USSR and it was Lysim Trofinko who persuaded Stalin and later the Chinese picked it up too, that natural selection was wrong and that you could have plants get acquired traits. And anyway it led to mass starvation and it was a case of an authoritarian state imposing error on the public. But of course the USSR didn't have a free press, it didn't have free institutions. And yet it is happening right before our eyes in this country. And it is one of the most horrifying aspects of this administration.
- [41:52]
A
It is breathtaking that the head of the CDC, Susan Menares, is sworn in on July 31 and doesn't last a month and sworn in by just the facts of the without any interpretation. Robert Kennedy swears her and says she has unimpeachable scientific credentials and within four weeks fires her. And the White House says she's not aligned with the President's make America health again priorities. It's truly, it's just so astonishing, it's almost beyond commentary.
- [42:27]
B
Yeah, and it is true that a lot of people who have concerns about the public health system, which may even be well founded, obviously the public health system in the United States did not perform very well under the pandemic. It has been politicized in all kinds of ways. And some of the people who perhaps take those criticisms too far, but are not completely unreasonable, people who went into the administration thinking that they could act on that, then a few weeks later are either pushed out or fired because they were not willing to go along with enough crazy stuff. So there's, you know, if you think about these people are very orthodox in the public health world and who I think do have some hard questions to answer. I mean, then people who are kind of heterodox and critical, some of whom have allowed themselves to be pulled into that world and then the true crazies. You know, a lot of the conflict you're seeing is between the people who came in as deeply heterodox, people concerned about some of the orthodoxies in public health. And. And they then very quickly discover, hang on a second. The thing that's going on here is way crazier than I thought. And I do wonder whether there's a failure of imagination here. I mean, in the first Trump administration, there's a lot of warnings by many political scientists and observers, et cetera, about all of the horrible things that would happen and some very bad things happened. But probably on the whole, the things that happened were less bad than some of the things that people warned about. And so it's easy to overlearn that lesson in the second Trump administration to think, okay, well, RFK is in charge and he's going to mess up some things. But, I mean, fully, he's not going to ban the MMR vaccine. But who knows where we're going to be in a year from now, right? Whether that's just going to be some report by this committee that misstates the truth about this in ways that are damaging, whether it's going to be the United States no longer requiring or strongly encouraging people to take the vaccines in various contexts, or whether it goes even beyond that to say we're going to stop giving it regulatory approval altogether, which would be an even more extreme thing. It's very hard to know, given how quickly things have moved between January 20, 2025, and September 3, 2025, on recording list, what they're going to look like on January 19, 2029.
- [44:53]
A
And I would defend the performance of the United States government during COVID There's lots to argue about with respect to shutdowns and closures. And in hindsight, I think we probably would make better judgments. There's, I think, some embarrassing episodes at the CDC along the way. But when I compare the US to the performance of European governments, I don't see stark differences. I mean, there's a lot of variety in Europe, from Italy to the UK To Sweden. I think we did much better than the authoritarian regimes around the world. We created amazing vaccines inside of six months. I mean, amazing vaccines that run into
- [45:30]
B
the great success story of the first Trump administration, which Trump no longer wants to claim.
- [45:34]
A
It is actually an amazing success story of the Trump administration, of advanced purchase contracts, a unique form of sort of procurement that the Trump administration azar employed, and of the free world, of the open world, the world where people pursue hypotheses and test them with integrity. We created not one vaccine. I mean, how are we to create four? Operational warp speed, I think, funded three. Then there's AstraZeneca, Germany, the UK the US the free world produces an amazing raft of vaccines inside of six months. Show me the Sino vaccine, the Russo vaccine.
- [46:14]
D
There was a Sino vaccine and it didn't work. It was terrible.
- [46:19]
A
I mean, this is. I just defend. Even though, yeah, school closures and all that and guidance could have been much
- [46:25]
C
better, I am actually a little bit more critical. There's a book that was published by two Princeton political scientists, Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee, called In Covid's Wake. And it's a very interesting book and it's particularly interesting that I haven't seen it reviewed anywhere. And basically they lay out the case that if you asked any epidemiologist before the COVID epidemic hit, would shutdowns work, would masking and all the measures that we took work? There's a universal consensus that it wasn't going to be effective over the long run because ultimately there was no way of keeping the vaccine from getting out. And they go through a lot of evidence. So I mean, I guess the one criticism I have of the book is that a lot of the conclusions that they come to are pretty evident now in retrospect. But given the fact that we didn't really understand how lethal the vaccine, the COVID virus was at the time, you can kind of excuse the overestimation of the threat. But essentially in retrospect, that Great Barrington Declaration that was so criticized at the time was actually probably the best policy. And that was actually the policy that Sweden followed under Anders Tegnel. Swedes had a much higher mortality rate early on, but after two years it was identical to every other country in Scandinavia. And I think that there is actually a kind of lack of accountability. I mean, these two political scientists are ones that especially Francis Lee, that have written about polarization. And I think that what they are arguing was that there actually was an alternative to shutdowns and masking and so forth that never got a fair hearing because of the polarization, because it was associated with the right. Nobody wanted to hear about it. And I think it's something we ought to think about in retrospect.
- [48:48]
D
Could I just jump in really quick because I actually don't agree with Frank on this.
- [48:54]
B
From disagreement on the Good fight club. Excellent. All right. No,
- [48:59]
D
my understanding is that it's very hard to compare, for example, the results in US states partly because there was a tremendous amount of self shutdown that went on. It didn't matter what the governor said, it didn't matter what the policies were. People made their own decisions. And in many instances the states that get criticized for having been too tough were really doing nothing more than the citizens of their states were already doing on their own. Also, I mean, I do think that the one area where blue states made an error was in shutting down schools and keeping them closed too long. But however much we may want to go back and we should sort of do the post mortem on how we handled the pandemic, I think we would all agree that the MRNA technology that allowed for the rapid development of those miracle vaccines saved millions of lives, maybe even some of our own, and was a brilliant thing. And MRNA technology is widely considered to be one of the most promising avenues now for other treatments, for cancer treatment, for targeting the immune system, to attack cancers in the body, and so forth. And one of the things that RFK Jr. Has done, because he is truly nuts, is that he has canceled all of the contracts that the US government had let to do further research into
- [50:38]
B
MRNA I have a few thoughts. The first is that you need to allow me one small little self plug, which is that of course we had Francis Lee and Steven Macedo on the podcast and I think it's a really interesting book and they're a very convincing conversation. So if you, dear listener, have not yet listened to that episode, please go back through your podcasting app. And by the way, make sure that your podcasting app is subscribed to the Good Fight in general and listen to that conversation. It's really worthwhile. The second thing to say about this MRNA vaccines is that it's just one more case where the Trump administration is so exasperating because they start from something that might in certain ways be reasonable and then immediately go to something that's completely unreasonable. You know, the criticisms of universities in many ways reasonable, and then they attack in universities in ways that clearly undermine free speech in extreme ways. You know, add the margins. You know, should we have recommended these MRNA vaccines to 19 year old healthy men who were at no serious risk of COVID And were those some evidence that in rare cases it may have led to to some form of heart damage? Perhaps not. Is it reasonable to say we should revisit whether now that most Americans have had many shots of this vaccine and that we've had a number of boosters of them? Perhaps you revisit the guidance about, you know, exactly which Americans should still be getting yet another booster. Perfectly reasonable to look into that. Perhaps an important corrective needed. But to jump from that to what the position now is, which is to stop research into how this incredible new technology can potentially deliver vaccines against Cancer vaccine against all kinds of diseases that is truly horrible and will cost, indeed, the lives of many, many Americans. I want to close with a broader question to each of you, which is one that I keep coming back to in this second Trump administration. How do we call out the sheer madness of some of what the Trump administration is doing, while also continuing to see where our own institutions are flawed, where our own side of a political aisle is flawed? How can we, in a very clear way condemn this attack on public health, which I think is a complete disaster, but without therefore saying, oh, let's not look at the flaws in public health, and let's not look at some of the things that we got wrong? It seems easy, but I think in practice it's really hard to do. And I think as a country, we're failing to do that. I don't think the Democrats are succeeding in doing that. I don't think a lot of the media is succeeding in doing that. How do we actually reform the institutions that are in deep need of reform? How do we recognize that they really are flawed in ways that make people disenchant of a political system, but without therefore paddling just how crazy some of the stuff that's happening at the moment from the Trump administration is?
- [53:41]
A
Sorry to jump in here. I totally resonate with that. We need to revive the spirit of reform and the cause of reform. You can't fight ungoverning and destruction with a defense of the status quo, with essentially a kind of conservative complacent. Everything was fine before this happened. You have to fight it with a reformist vision. And the reform, yes, has to be reform of institutions, has to be reform of policies. And that requires a different. This is what I really appreciate about the Macedo and Lee book. I think what gives that book its passion is their intense frustration that debate was closed down. I'm not sure I'm convinced of their conclusions, but that we couldn't debate the Great Barrington statement that if you thought the wrong thing during COVID Democrats, liberals ostracized you, they branded you as evil, they shut you down. It was like you couldn't question masking or shut down. And that idea that, you know, we have to listen to the science, as if science is univocal, as if there's in politics right answers. And our job as progressives is just to enforce and make authoritative the right answers. There are no right answers about anything. We are in a fog. We have to debate. We're feeling our way around. We need the illumination that comes from different perspectives different people and from disagreement. And so to really hammer out of a reform program and project, we have to open up. And that's what I really take from Lee and Maceda. We have to open up and let the debate in, let the argument happen.
- [55:16]
C
No, that's absolutely right. I remember in the middle of the pandemic, J. Bhattacharya, who was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a fellow at FSI at my institute. And we actually had a debate about kicking him out for having been the author of that. And so they're absolutely right. You simply could not have debated the rights and wrongs of that at that time because of this kind of polarization. And I think that's really the point of their book. It's not so much were the policies right or wrong, but shouldn't there have been a greater willingness to actually talk about that and that. I think they're. In that respect, I think they're absolutely right.
- [55:59]
B
Mona, you get the last word.
- [56:01]
D
Okay, well, it's funny because on the right now, we have a weird phenomenon where you're perfectly allowed to have disagreements about policy and you will not be shut down as long as you give your total loyalty to. To the Dear Leader. And if you're loyal to Trump, you can say whatever you want about any subject. He won't hold that against you. As long as you are on the Trump train with the Democrats and the left, they are still groping toward how to have arguments and how to be opened. And they have all too often. I mean, I think right now, because of the cultish nature of the Republican Party, there actually is more debate on the Democratic side. I mean, you have, for example, the big debate going on right now between the abundance faction and the anti abundance people. So there's some of it, but there is still that sort of reflex of we get to decide what is acceptable discourse. And if you're outside of that, we will shut you down and we will will label you. And that is very dangerous. And not only is it dangerous for free speech, but it's really bad for them politically because it turns off so many people who are moderate. And the Democratic Party, if it hopes to succeed, cannot be just the party of the faculty lounge. It has to reach out to moderate goaters again.
- [57:43]
B
And I think Mona just got some guests and her dog are upset about it. So this is a perfect time to end this conversation. Thank you so much for this really fun conversation and at times even debate to Francis Fukuyama, to Mona Charan, and to Russell head.
- [57:59]
A
Thanks Yashi for talking with you.
- [58:02]
B
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [58:29]
C
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [58:33]
B
Thanks thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.