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.
I'm an '80s kid and '90s teen, and I definitely saw massive shifts in what was considered appropriate. That said, even in the '90s, if she was 16 but looked 18, people didn't really bat an eye. My take is that there was a pervasive belief in certain circles that the age of consent was set too high.
Interesting that we've seen a sharp dropoff in reports of teachers fucking their students. That used to be red meat for journalism.