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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/politics@beehaw.org

This is admittedly about a month old, but I just ran across it. If you've got an hour to spare sometime (or just need something interesting as background noise), I'd highly recommend it.

Kurt Andersen joins Joanna Coles to trace Donald Trump’s rise from Spy magazine punchline to the ultimate show-business president, arguing that Trump didn’t invent the con so much as perfect a distinctly American tradition stretching back to P.T. Barnum’s “clever humbug,” where attention matters more than truth and audiences happily play along. Andersen dissects Trump’s maximalist language—everything the “greatest,” the “best,” the “like nobody’s ever seen”—and warns that the same improvisational instincts that fueled his celebrity now shape foreign policy, including claims of negotiations with Iran that didn’t exist and a presidency run like an endless next episode. They close on Epstein, conspiracies, and the blurry line between con and belief—asking whether Trump the salesman now believes his own pitch, and what it means when politics becomes a spectacle with global stakes.

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[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The only two other countries I've lived in had none of our problems, but I'm getting old, so I can't speak to the current state of affairs. As an exchange student, jeans were really fucking expensive, but Birkenstocks were cheap as fuck.

In fact, anyone claiming to be proud of their country was ostracized. Guess the countries, eh?

We've brainwashed citizens into believing a nice story about how we're special and can do no wrong. I'm surprised Alex Jones didn't call the attack on a girls' school a false-flag operation.

My parents started telling me in the late '80s that I needed to stop interacting at my intellectual level, because I'd not make any friends that way. Great parenting, right there. I'm taking intermediate college algebra at ASU in third grade, and you want me to dumb it down by more years than I've been alive?

this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
13 points (100.0% liked)

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