John Ganz: Trump’s Coalition of the Aggrieved

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Glad to welcome to the show the author of Unpopular Front on Substack. He wrote the book, When the Clock Broke, Conmen Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s about the David Duke and the right-wing media ecosystem. We're gonna talk about that. He hosts a film podcast, Unclear and Present Danger with Jamal Bowie.
It's Jon Ganz. How you doing, man?

**John Ganz** (0:39)
Good, how are you, Tim?

**Tim Miller** (0:40)
Well, I kind of feel like I'm in college again because I was up vomiting all night, and I had to meet with TA this morning to discuss some reading. Habermas, where we cross-barred, and we're going to do a little René Girard, so we'll be okay. It wasn't the fun kind of vomiting though, so you got to carry me. You got to carry me. Is that all right?

**John Ganz** (1:02)
Okay. I will do my best. I will do my best. I was not vomiting so far as I can remember.

**Tim Miller** (1:08)
Not the best evening. I just want to start if people aren't familiar with your sub stack, which is great. Give us a little baseline for your politics. JVL and our internal Slack was calling you one of the good socialists. I don't know if you accept that moniker, but why don't you give people-

**John Ganz** (1:22)
What's the good part of the socialist part?

**Tim Miller** (1:24)
Either. Yeah.

**John Ganz** (1:25)
Yeah. I guess you could say I'm a social Democrat. I would say that's how I would identify. That's the tradition I feel closest to.

**Tim Miller** (1:33)
Like David Brooks.

**John Ganz** (1:34)
Yeah. Like David Brooks used to be. I hope I don't have the same trajectory. I think I'm too old for that now already. But that's part of the socialist tradition. It's one part of the socialist tradition historically.
It comes with a commitment both to an economy that tries to work for everyone and also a commitment usually to liberal democracy and a robust free society.

**Tim Miller** (2:03)
Give me, if John Ganz was in Congress, who would your doppelganger be?

**John Ganz** (2:08)
I mean, I very, very rarely disagree with anything Bernie Sanders says. I got to tell you. And we're very temperamentally similar, I think.
Elizabeth Warren is someone else I have a lot of admiration for. AOC. I was very excited about her rise and I support Zara Mamdani. So these are my politics, basically.

**Tim Miller** (2:31)
I've had too many Bernie people on the pod lately. I've got to, we need to cleanse. I need to cleanse. I need to get Joe Manchin back on the pod.

**John Ganz** (2:37)
Yeah, you got to find somebody left of Bernie to put on the pod, like some PSL people or something like that. I could tell you how he's a revisionist.

**Tim Miller** (2:48)
I'm open to it. I want to start with just Trump administration stuff, then we're going to go back into your book and the origin of how we got here. On the right, you wrote this, which resonated with me, which shouldn't surprise you, given that I've got to wake up and talk about this nonsense every day.
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn't enjoying my job anymore, because it was at once too easy and too awful. The people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both. That's all there is to say over and over. Anything else strains the truth.

**John Ganz** (3:21)
I stand by that.
Yeah, absolutely. I think what I wrote after that is actually, it's become more difficult and not as easy, because I find that when you write a political analysis, you usually attribute motives or reasons for people's behavior, and sometimes those reasons are ideological, sometimes they're self-interested, sometimes they're in the context of partisan politics. You try to make it legible for people, and you try to put your spin on it, maybe advance your politics a little, but generally try to communicate the truth. With the actions of the Trump administration, it's very difficult, I find, to give them any coherence because it's so based on Trump's personal whims and his own very idiosyncratic and mercurial way of doing things. I often find that when I attribute some kind of ideological thinking or some kind of project to anything they do, a week from then, the line has totally changed.
Usually, a presidential coalition has tensions, but theirs is an open confrontation with each other all the time, which is unusual. A president usually undertaking a project like going to war, say. Now, usually, you would imagine, I mean, this is the way we used to think about politics. They would first have their own party very much on board, and then they would use that as a platform to get the rest of the American people on board. Now, Trump didn't even have his own party on board, going into it. So it's a different type of politics than we grew up with and we're accustomed to commenting on, and it very much is the Trump show. And he personalizes everything. He is not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions, ideas like the market or-