Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair

In 1977, Jimmy Carter entered the White House with as much public goodwill as any president in modern times (an 80% approval rating) on the promise of restoring decency through political restraint and shared sacrifice. Sound familiar? On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan talks to historian Rick Perlstein about the latest edition to his spectacular three-volume history of the modern right wing, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, which documents the presidency of Carter and the emergence of Ronald Reagan in the wake of Watergate. When the bill came due for Carter's “ideological profligacy” of aiming to please everyone, Perlstein says, Carter crashed and Reagan rose to power on a strategy of “organized discontent,” building the reactionary coalitions that would haunt America for the next four decades. Perlstein’s history is a blueprint of the politics that brought us Trump—and a cautionary tale for President-elect Joe Biden. "We can’t change the past,” says Perlstein, "but we can live with our eyes open."

The Massachusetts AG joined this week’s episode of Inside the Hive to talk about taking on the Trump administration, handling election interference, and how to transition to the next chapter.

On this week’s episode, we are lucky enough to share the conversation between President Obama and Jesmyn Ward, which is featured in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. They talk about his new memoir, the state of our country, and the process of writing truths about themselves. For this listen—and so many things—we have a lot to be grateful for. 

Jake Tapper, chief Washington correspondent for CNN, returns to “Inside the Hive” for an in-depth conversation on the state of the media in these bitter, waning days of the Trump era. While Trump and his legal team spin outlandish conspiracies to reverse the legitimate election of Joe Biden, Tapper separates fact from fiction, casts skepticism on a Trump “coup,” and considers the long-term damage Trump’s war on reality has done to American life. How much is the media—including CNN—culpable for his rise? Will his political influence stay alive or decline when he finally leaves office? And will the media, addicted to the ratings his chaos provides, continue to empower him with attention?

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On this week’s podcast, cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan game out the political future of the Trump machine in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s decisive electoral victory. While Trump drums up hysteria about a coup to fan the passions of his minions—prepping, no doubt, for a right-wing media company to challenge Fox News—the rest of the media faces a reckoning: Will we continue to breathe life into Trump’s reality show by indulging his 24/7 madness with cameras and microphones? Will Jared and Ivanka manage to sneak back into Upper East Side society or will they be pecked to death by angry socialites? As the nation teeters between the political chaos of Trumpism and a cooler, saner Bidenesque calm, we have a painful postmortem to conduct, but also, for the first time in a long time, hope. 

The election came and went and we are here to talk it all through, break it all down, and feel our way through what may come next. Co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox go over what the polls and pundits missed, the cooling effect of a President Biden, and the impacts of the Trump derangement syndrome we're all suffering from. 

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan ask the question: If this reality-TV presidency was scripted, how might it end? Expanding on a special project published in the Hive this week—in which Susan Orlean, Tom Perrotta, Anthony Scaramucci, Alexandra Petri and others imagine a Trump-era “finale”—the hosts bring in special guest Lee Eisenberg, former head writer of The Office (and Hive-famous financée to Fox), to discuss how a writer’s room in Hollywood might build a bookend to the series—or, as the case may be, a cliffhanger to another season of Trumpian hell. In the spirit of both hope and realism, the hosts offer advice for surviving the next week and begin (carefully) imagining post-election possibilities for a nation desperate to wean itself from Trump’s show-and-awe dopamine hits. 

This week, Hive special correspondent Gabe Sherman, who has covered Donald Trump since 2015, joins cohost Joe Hagan for an in-depth discussion of the final days of the 2020 election and - possibly - the Trump era. Sherman and Hagan look past the polls to discern the narrative logic of Trump’s reality-TV presidency: As he runs out of storylines and ideas, the President of “scandal, chaos and conflict" has been bested by his biggest political competitor of the 2020 campaign: the coronavirus. Desperate to distract the public from the reality of mass death and joblessness, Trump has failed to live up to his own entertainment credo: “He’s become boring,” says Sherman. Carefully peeking past November 3rd, the two Hive reporters consider what comes next for Trump, for the media, and, more importantly, for an exhausted nation — is it possible to return to political normalcy, even under Joe Biden?  

With less than three weeks to go before the election, Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett joins co-host Emily Jane Fox to talk about the closing arguments each candidate is making—or not making, as it may be. Plus, he weighs in on the bigger questions of how Washington could normalize in a post-Trump world and what we should be doing in this final countdown. 

With President Donald Trump as contagion in chief and the election right around the corner, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox break down the administration's trust deficit, the debate over the next presidential debate, and the personal bellwethers they've seen over the last few weeks.

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-host Emily Jane Fox sits down with former Obama White House advisor Valerie Jarrett to discuss what it’s like to work with Joe Biden, how debate prep usually works, what’s at stake in the coming weeks, and what a difference mentorship can make. 

With a Supreme Court nomination fight, a debate slugfest, and a battle for the soul of our nation on the horizon, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk about what’s at stake for the winners and losers and how to make it through alive.

This week, “Inside the Hive” welcomes historian Peter Fritzsche, author of "Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich,” to help separate fact from exaggeration on the increasingly pressing question of how much Trump’s GOP resembles the Nazis of the early 1930s. As Donald Trump attacks democratic norms and undermines the electoral process, and AG William Barr stokes fear of "a socialist path” if Trump loses, historians are hearing distressing echoes of Adolph Hitler’s rise, from the fear-mongering demonization of the left to the threat of street violence and military force against enemies real and imagined. One difference: “A white ethnic America is much more important in Trumps’ campaign than the vision of a Aryan-ized Germany was in Hitler’s electoral campaigns,” says Fritzsche, who says the MAGA conception of America "means there are villains who have undone America but now there are the virtuous who can remake America and 'make it great again.’ I call it ‘muscular melodramatic populism'”—the same phenomenon that brought Hitler to power. 

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