Alexandria Valentine

Brett Meiselas: After the 2024 election, we saw so many people bending the knee, tech executives, a lot of people in the media, law firms… doing everything they can to make their journey down to Mar-a-Lago, to kiss the ring… It just felt like a misread of the moment. And they acted like Donald Trump had this massive mandate when he really only won by a very slim percentage, and they went all in on him, abandoned all of their values that they claimed to have… And now we see a massive shift, a massive political shift, a massive cultural shift, because I think what we saw with Donald Trump is he came out instantly, shock and awe. That was his strategy, shock and awe. But he did not expect the people to stand up… And also, now here we are years later, and everything just seems to be falling apart…  He seems to be devolving kind of into Trump 1.0, where you’re seeing all these staffing issues and infighting and people trying to get each other fired and people lasting five days in a job. And it just reeks of not only incompetence, but it reeks of corruption, instability, and it’s everything the American people don’t want right now.

Brett Meiselas: This is something that has been decades in the making… I don’t even think people totally understand how deep it goes. It’s one of the things we speak about in our new book, WTF America.. is how the seeds were planted for this right-wing infrastructure going back to the ’70s. I’m talking about Roger Ailes in the Nixon administration, having a document that said, “A Plan to Put the GOP on TV News,” and it took him a few decades to actually implement that, along with Rupert Murdoch. But they’ve since built this behemoth, this incredible right-wing machine. I don’t mean that in a good way, but this right-wing machine that allows there to never be another Richard Nixon situation anymore, where somebody is actually held responsible. In many ways, that was the original sin for so many of these people, that they wanted to fight back on. They wanted to build a propaganda machine. And now we’re seeing that with Fox and these right-wing influencers, and they are just polluting the airwaves. They are taking over companies. And it was also laid out for us in black and white in Project 2025.

Hume: The president has been out campaigning vigorously, but I'm not sure it's making any difference and what difference it would make I'm not sure is helping.  In Texas, he is calling James Talarico “Tala-freak-o.” He is not a freak. You see him. He seems mild mannered and pleasant and not an unattractive candidate.  This cuddling up to Vladimir Putin at this moment… I don’t think that plays well. The American public can’t stand Putin. And this fiasco with the press secretary…