Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
It’s the last week of 2023 and 2024 already feels like too much to handle—what with Donald Trump’s promise to be a dictator for “one day” if reelected and his insistence that immigrants are “poisoning” American blood. In The New Abnormal’s latest episode, hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy chat with the Center for American Progress’ president Patrick Gaspard about Trump’s “aspirational fascism” and the stakes in the coming election.
“He's promised to use his Department of Justice to go after political enemies and said he would instruct his Attorney General to indict and possibly jail anyone he opposes,” Gaspard notes. “He called his opponents vermin, the kind of language we haven't heard since the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s. And he said that his political opponents in America pose a greater threat than our enemies in North Korea, and he would treat them accordingly. These are not things that we're projecting on him.”
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On a cheerier note, the pod also welcomes Martin Pengelly, the Washington breaking news correspondent for The Guardian, to talk about his fascinating new book Brotherhood: When West Point Rugby Went to War. The book, Pengelly says, is “trying to express what rugby is at West Point and what rugby is at West Point has changed.”
One of Pengelly’s passages from the book sums it up best: “It fostered an outsider’s bond. It was tribal, irreverent and fun. That suited those for whom the hardest part of West Point was the adjustment to military discipline. Some will always have difficulty keeping a straight face. And it wasn’t a coincidence that some found a home under Mike Mahan, the rugby coach, who once chafed at Officialdom himself.”
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
