Mixed Signals: Trump, the man’s man at the RNC, AKA the happiest place on Earth

Ben Smith: You’re terrifying. I can’t remember being woken up by the hotel room phone. That was four minutes ago.

Nayeema Raza: And I say I’m not a morning person, so if I’m up in the morning and you’re not here, I am going to hunt you down and make you come. By the way, you think you were horrified? I was horrified having to look at Google images of your three star hotel in Milwaukee.

Ben: They’re very generous with hotel ratings these days.

[MUSIC]

Ben: Hi, I am Ben Smith.

Nayeema: I’m Nayeema Raza.

Ben: And this is Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. What a week.

Nayeema: Oh, what a week. Last week has been nonstop for politics. It’s been nonstop for media and there are three major or concurrent media cycles. The first, of course, is this shocking assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on Saturday, which prompted an investigation that is playing out in a 24/7 news cycle alongside what feels like 24/10 or 28/10 social media cycle of speculation, raising questions, and conspiracies on both the left and the right.

Ben: Yeah.

Nayeema: There’s also this heavily covered Republican National Convention where the bearded JD Vance has been anointed running mate and where the non-bearded Ben Smith is covering for Semafor. Ben, how is Milwaukee?

Ben: It is the happiest place on earth. I, like a lot of journalists, came to Milwaukee, I think genuinely worried that people here hated media so much that it was going to be slightly scary, and what we, instead, found were people who I’ve just never, I’ve been to, probably, it’s my ninth convention, never seen one with this little tension, this much happiness. People feel confident they’re going to win the election. Republicans do. Any internal divisions in the party have basically been purged. So it’s this MAGA celebration with a little thread of belief that Donald Trump was spared, essentially, by God from this horrible assassination attempt. So people are even being nice to journalists, is the outcome of that.

Nayeema: Yeah. Well, he is, as we played in a song that Max Tawney gave us, the chosen one.

Ben: People believed that before a bit, and then you don’t have to be that religious to believe that when a bullet gets that close to someone.

Nayeema: And then, of course, the third media cycle, President Biden has contracted Covid. The walls seem to be closing in. I’m sure that’s making people, I don’t know. Are they praying for him or are they laughing about that?

Ben: They’re laughing. I was sitting in the Grand Hotel here where all the campaign staff stay, or the senior ones, when it flashed on Fox News, which is all of the screens, that Biden had Covid, and it was, I feel like the reaction was sort of incredulous/sympathetic laughter. It was just, are you kidding? But, again, it feels biblical.

Nayeema: The walls seemed to be really closing in around him with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, pressing him to get out, and then Semafor had this big scoop the other day where Jeffrey Katzenberg is telling Biden that the money is running dry.

Ben: This three weeks, I think, took an election that journalists were spending a lot of time complaining was boring and predictable into the most the kind of politics that would make a laughable West Wing script that nobody would believe. Beginning with rising pressure, which is a year too late, following that terrible debate President Biden had, on Biden to leave the race, which he, at first, seemed to be resisting and is getting harder and harder to resist, which then flowed into the assassination attempt, Trump’s miraculous survival, and the Republican arrival in Milwaukee for the MAGA coronation.

Nayeema: You talk about it being some West Wing script, but it also, it has this real man energy to everything that’s going on right now. Last week we talked about gender being a key undercurrent of this election, and I think that’s what’s crystallized in the last few weeks is that Donald Trump has really, genuinely, deeply cemented his place in the manosphere, whether that’s with UFC, black boxing, the church, the Silicon Valley tech bros, the crypto crowd, and it’s probably best captured in what has emerged in the last three weeks as this quintessentially manly image of the former president fist pumped in the air, blood on his ear in cheek, American flag in the background, and mouth open to say, “Fight, fight, fight,” which is just moments after literally dodging a bullet. Did that picture inspire manliness for you, Ben? Did you feel like more or less of a man looking at that image?

Ben: I think I’m going to dodge that question, but incredible image. Yeah, I think in some sense, the media story is it is these deep connections between this new both online media of figures, by the way, like Joe Rogan who was a martial arts fighter.

Nayeema: Which is actually the best training for interviewing, I think.

Ben: Yeah, I guess it worked out. You just get hit in the head a lot and then it improves your skills. And Trump’s connection to the UFC. Remember right after his conviction in New York, he went to a UFC fight.

Announcer: Being ushered in by UFC CEO, Dana White, Donald Trump is in the building, and the former president’s getting a standing ovation from the assembled masses.

Ben: So much of this convention is aimed at young men and you really feel it here. I bet you feel it on the other side of the TV, too.

Nayeema: I do. Well, I don’t know if I feel it, but I don’t think I’m the intended audience.

Ben: Sure they’ll be glad to have you.

Nayeema: Let’s take a quick break to meditate on the manliness of Donald Trump and unpack it when we’re back.

[Music]

Nayeema: In a moment. We’re going to dive into the manosphere, but let’s talk about the big news this weekend, which was the assassination. You and I traded texts that night, Ben. It was past midnight for me. I was in Italy, and then of course I texted you, my podcast partner, Ben. Where were you?

Ben: I was at home scrambling.

Nayeema: You texted me back that image and I was like, that’s the shot on a film set. You see the image and you’re like, oh, we got the shot, we can wrap. Iconic, scary, shocking.

Ben: I think a lot of people in Trump’s orbit actually found it maybe shocking, but not surprising. I

Nayeema: Think that when these kind of breaking news moments happen, there’s just wall to wall media environment and I think there’s a sense that they’re like, oh, everybody’s just creating clickbait. But then there seemed to be this shyness of the media to come in here, a little bit of self-censorship, and then also if you say the wrong thing, you will be pounced on.

Ben: Aren’t you afraid to say the wrong thing, and shouldn’t you be? Do you not feel that?

Nayeema: As we tape this?

Ben: Sure. Somebody tried to assassinate the former president. Don’t you think it’s worth being a little? I don’t know.

Nayeema: Are you worried, Ben, about saying the wrong thing?

Ben: No, he’ll be pounced on, on Twitter, who cares? But honestly, at this point, I think you have to sort of restrain the impulse to analysis and focus on trying to tell people what happened, which is certainly what we were doing at Semafor, and why it happened and how meaningful political actors were responding, which was sometimes very responsibly, sometimes in totally lunatic ways. Got a piece of guidance on how to cover this from the top aid to Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, and then this aid, Dmitri Melhorn’s advice was to really seriously consider the possibility that it was a Putin style staged attack. People had some very strange and revealing reactions.

Nayeema: Revealing of their own biases or what they wanted to see, it was like a Rorschach test of the assassination. I guess there was also this fear of saying the wrong thing, which led to some media muting of shows like Morning Joe on Monday morning and John Stewart’s daily show.

Ben: The most cautious elements of kind of the big corporate media I think were particularly concerned. NBC Universal told the people at Morning Joe that they had some other feed they wanted to air and kept them off the air on Monday morning. I think Max learned basically because they were afraid they might say something inflammatory or insufficiently sympathetic to the former president.

Nayeema: Yes, being insensitive.

Ben: And Joe Scarborough’s just furious about that when he realized that he’d been tricked off the air at this huge news moment.

Nayeema: We have a clip of that. Let’s play that clip.

Joe Scarborough: Next time we’re told there’s going to be a newsfeed replacing us, we will be in our chairs.

Mika Brzezinski: We’ll be sitting here.

Joe Scarborough: And the newsfeed will be us or they can get somebody else.

Mika Brzezinski: We’ll still be sitting here.

Joe Scarborough: To host the show.

Ben: Oh, wow. Yeah,

Nayeema: Jominka not very happy.

Ben: It was a huge vote of no confidence from their bosses and them to say, we’re not confident in you not to say something insane on television, which actually, it seemed unfair in my opinion.

Nayeema: You were your panelists, presumably.

Ben: Yeah.

Nayeema: There has been a much more long-running battle between Donald Trump and the media. Both sides would say that the other has put a target on their backs. Is that insensitive? You seem like it’s insensitive to say.

Ben: We’ll let that pass, but thanks for checking.

Nayeema: The media would say that Donald Trump has put a target on their back. Donald Trump would say the media put a target on his back. I think there’s been this long-running fight, and in this environment, there’s this chilling effect.

Ben: Yeah, it’s a very dark, scary moment, and I think people in the media reacted with a caution that was both just appropriate. We don’t know what’s going on, it’s a genuine crisis, the take, economy can pause for a minute, but also I think a real physical fear. If you saw in the minutes after the shooting, people turned around in that press pen or turned around at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and screaming at the journalists, “You did this.”

Nayeema: This is a highly charged environment. People in the crowd are injured, hit, they’re rushing to get out. There is actually a shot taken by an attendee, Corey Comperatore, the volunteer firefighter, another military veteran is also severely injured in this. This is a very charged moment. I imagine people are really fearful, but the fact that they turned to the media that were there and blame them, that’s very revealing, right?

Ben: Yeah, it makes me really sad, honestly, because they’re yelling, I bet you’re, either basically blaming the media and then also saying, I think sincerely, “Are you happy, now?” I think you can legitimately argue, is the media too hard on Donald Trump? Whatever. That’s a different conversation, but it is worth pausing to say, I do not think that anybody in the media was rooting for Donald Trump to get shot.

Nayeema: No.

Ben: And there was a thread of the folks who really support Trump. It really deeply believed that the media is out to get him. There was this thing that made me saddest was this Facebook post by one of his relatives saying-

Nayeema: The daughter, Allison.

Ben: Yes. She said that the media will not tell you that he died a real life superhero. They’re not going to tell you how quickly he threw my mom and I to the ground. They’re not going to tell you that he shielded my body from the bullet that came at us. She obviously had just the most utterly horrible experience, but also, of course the media is going to tell you that. I’m sure the media was all over her trying to get her to come on television and tell exactly that story and the idea that she thinks that American journalists are going to cover that up really makes me sad. And she’s been told things about the media that aren’t true.

Nayeema: Well, yeah, that one really broke my heart. That is just an unimaginable loss. He’s certainly a hero in that story, and I think the media definitely does want to tell and has told that story, and yet, it shows this distrust of the media, this bifurcation. And Ohio’s junior senator, and now Trump’s VP also chimed in, JD Vance, didn’t blame the media, but blamed Biden tweeting immediately that today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

Ben: And again, that’s strictly speaking not true. We think the shooter seems to have Googled Biden, Googled Trump, seems to have been a different kind of lunatic, but that sentiment, very, very clear across the Republican party.

Nayeema: And yet, one corner of the media like Twitter X, a lot of people thought when Elon Musk took over Twitter that it was going to fade into some backdrop. A lot of journalists left the platform out of concerns of how he’s running it and lack of content moderation, et cetera, and yet, in moments like this, Twitter really takes off.

Ben: It’s still the live conversation, although also, a disaster area. Staged was immediately trending, the word, the notion that it was staged. Some poor Italian soccer journalists got named as the shooter and millions of impressions of blue check marks, not a particularly functioning place, but very important.

Nayeema: The AI feature, Grok, was pushing out a Twitter moment headline suggesting that Kamala Harris was shot because the AI was feeding into what is happening and pushing it forward. And Elon Musk, Silicon Valley rushing to make their endorsements of Trump very clear reaching into their pocketbooks after this moment, Linda Yaccarino jumping up to say, “Imagine a world without X after a weekend like this past weekend. Let’s stick together in the days ahead and stick to X always.” Really a big moment for Twitter, for misinformation, for conspiracy, but I think it’s really important to say this was happening on both sides of the equation.

Ben: And I think, as you say, it’s funny. I think they’ve trained people to not believe anything there successfully, because there were these nonsense lies everywhere. But I think consumers have now learned to not trust anything, which is its own obvious problem.

Nayeema: But then also, this hugely valuable user generated content that comes out in these moments, as well, which is a new part of news.

Ben: Did you find the user generated content valuable? I thought what was so valuable was just the facts emerging mostly from professional reporters like the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue interviewing somebody on the scene, and that was all living on Twitter. But actually, I think the stuff I found myself consuming, actually, was more journalism.

Nayeema: Yeah, I think it is the journalism, but it’s analysis that content comes from somewhere. I think that Bell and Kat, these platforms that make sense of all the social noise that’s out there, the New York Times Visual Investigations Team, Malachy Browne, they just did a visual analysis coming from all these different videos that have been posted online, and I think that there is useful information coming out of the noise. It just takes some interpretation, right?

Ben: Yeah. Our job is to filter it, in a way, that’s right.

Nayeema: Exactly. So it plays a part. But a lightning round before we move on. One, I’m sad I didn’t join you in Milwaukee, Ben, what is the vibe?

Ben: Yeah, the vibe just could not be more different from what the media expected. Networks literally brought big security teams, and actually, Kadia and I got a little roughed up by the detail of one of the NBC talent security rushing her from point A to point B, lest she be bothered by Republicans. But in fact, the Republicans are in such a good mood. I haven’t been at a political convention, so free of conflict, so free of tension. The Parties entirely belongs to Donald Trump,

Nayeema: But they’re also very chanting. JD Vance, JD Vance.

Crowd: JD, JD, JD.

Nayeema: JD Vance has been announced, he’s a, I think, a really smart add to the ticket. Someone who fits into two worlds that Donald Trump talks to but never really fit into, which is the base that comes from this Appalachian heritage and this Midwestern background, but also the elite. He went to Yale, and Donald Trump has never really fit into either of those worlds in the right way, and JD Vance does that. How’s the reaction been to him?

Ben: Yeah, pretty rapturous, very well received, very. I think they’re going to struggle to take his most extreme statements around social policy and things like that, and tar him as an extremist, which they’re certainly going to try to do, but I don’t think that’s necessarily how people are going to experience him.

Nayeema: And the ticket is not just the men on this ticket, but also the women. Last time we talked about the trends from girl bossing, to stay at home girlfriends, and the Trump-Vance ticket is also a Melania-Usha ticket, as well, which I think, by the way, is a very, very compelling ticket. You have Melania Trump, who is a model, comes from this certain background, you have Usha Vance who, in some ways, is like Michelle Obama, a high-flying lawyer who stepped down from her post to support her husband in this moment, but an equal partner. The Daily Beast had this piece that Usha Vance is about to transform into a Trumpian trad wife. I don’t think that’s true. I think that she might transform into a bit of a Michelle Obama.

Ben: I think a very relatable figure, I think to people like you and me, which is to say you can just see how much they hate elements of this and feel a bit trapped by it. There’s that old joke about the Secret Service caught somebody trying to climb over the White House, the security fence in the other direction.

Nayeema: Obama told a joke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He said

Barack Obama: That someone jumped the White House fence last week, but I have to give Secret Service credit. They found Michelle, brought her back. She’s safe. She’s safe back at home now.

Ben: Yeah, I knew she had enough of that, which any normal person in that situation would have to be, I thought, pretty quite relatable.

Nayeema: Yes, and on that note, let’s take a quick break. I will stop talking about the women and we’re going to talk about the men, how Trump has taken over the manosphere. We’re going to hear from Semafor reporter, Kadia Goba, who has been early on the story, deep in this world, and also hear from voices like Mike Tyson, Evan Elder, Lawrence Taylor, and other sports ball people.

All right. We discussed the assassination attempt, but we didn’t discuss how it reverberated through the manosphere. Here’s one clip from USC fighter, Evan Elder, who said this right after winning his fight at the ball arena in Denver.

Evan Elder: Hey, I heard they just tried to whack my boy, Trump. I’m glad that man’s okay. Long live Trump. Let’s go baby. Trump 2024.

Announcer: Denver. Let’s hear for Evan Elder.

Nayeema: What a scene. Ben, do you watch the UFC?

Ben: No. I just watch what I think of as normal sports, but now they got all these newfangled sports.

Nayeema: But you do watch speeches from UFC CEO, Dana White, at the RNC. He’s got that prime pre-Trump slot.

Ben: Yeah. The whole, and the aesthetics here are drawn from professional fighting, professional wrestling the first night, you have Donald Trump gets the second night walking down a long corridor with the camera receding behind him like a fighter entering the ring, and the last night of the convention is, right, it’s going to be really like the central aesthetics and the figures are from fighting. It’s fascinating. Are you a UFC fan?

Nayeema: Ben, it will surprise you that I am not. I’m not, but it was so controversial, I learned, and some of the research was episode that Senator John McCain, in 1996, billed it as human cockfighting, and then it led to the organization being shunned and regulated and censored, almost out of existence, until it was resuscitated by, do you know who?

Ben: I believe Ari Emmanuel?

Nayeema: No. Ari Emmanuel and Endeavor did, of course, acquire UFC, but actually before that, they could not get event programming, and it was Donald Trump, in 2001, that gave them an arena, the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

Ben: Gosh, is that right? That, I genuinely didn’t know that.

Nayeema: But they gained ground, in some way, partly thanks to Donald Trump, but also to reality TV, which that was not involving Donald Trump directly, but of course it was like a parallel universe to him where, in the 2000s, you all of a sudden had UFC fighters on these reality television shows during that boom period of The Apprentice, et cetera. So they’re coming up together.

Ben: Did you feel like, at the time, you knew about this stuff or did you miss it? No, I

Nayeema: No, I was watching America’s Next Top Model, and I had this thing where I was too good for reality TV, except for the fashion ones.

Ben: A lot of stuff that you and I probably didn’t watch, these turned out to be the central cultural forces in the United States and whatever we were paying attention to.

Nayeema: Yeah, it was also a bit of a counterculture. And so in that way, I think a lot of people were surprised when the first place that Donald Trump shows up after his conviction is at a UFC match, and that’s where he launches his TikTok channel, et cetera. It seemed it was a newish news story, but actually, the shape of that relationship is really interesting because thinking about it, it’s this manly men being men thing that was too aggressive, too out there, and it got pushed underground for a little bit, and there was this backlash where it just actually found a huge amount of force, found huge audiences, and it rises back up again from the ashes with Donald Trump, who, of course, has his own thing going on. He’s got his locker room chat. I think that they share an appeal to this broader backlash culture, this pendulum shift that people think has gone too far. And I just think there’s something very similar in the kind of trajectories of these two worlds that struck me.

Ben: Yeah, it’s amazing you mentioned John McCain, of course, who was Trump’s great nemesis and represented the last of the old traditions of the Republican Party, but he hated the UFC, and now you have this huge cultural force that I think people missed in the way that parts of the media really missed Trump’s appeal in the first place. You’re exactly right, it’s part of that same shift. Yeah, I wonder if we’re going to be, if we’re just all going to give us a few years, and it’s already a great media business, obviously, a huge business, but maybe what do you think? You think we’ll be going to UFC fights in a year or two? It’s just going to be so centrally part of the culture of Trump’s America if he wins?

Nayeema: I don’t know. I think it already is part, so centrally part of our culture. I don’t know if we’ll start going to them, but I think it represents the comeback, the comeback of men, right?

Ben: Yeah. You, obviously, have been following this one for a while. What turned you on to this story? When did you become obsessed with this story?

Nayeema: It’s funny. I think I became obsessed with this story, not as a journalist, but as a woman in the dating world. Part of my reporting comes from this where I do think.

Ben: But you had to bring your whole self to work, as they say.

Nayeema: Bring your whole self to work. I started hearing it five or six years ago where women would start saying things like, “Oh, don’t you think men will find you intimidating?” And I think that it just gave me a sense that, oh, wow, we are in a different world where the conversations that were playing out in the political and media environments, conversations about Me Too, et cetera, we’re hitting home in people’s lives in a real way. All of a sudden you had men saying, “Well, how can I hit on a woman? How can I ask a girl out or kiss a girl?” And I think that they felt boundaried and caged, and I think women also were finding like, oh, how am I going to find a man that’s strong enough for me? That’s where I became fascinated by this story. I don’t know, Ben, if you think that’s bizarre.

Ben: No, no. I guess these currents, then, always are the real things that are driving media and politics.

Nayeema: Yeah.

Ben: And I guess, I don’t know, did you immediately see that in Donald Trump?

Nayeema: I didn’t immediately see it, but I think early on in Me Too, it was around the time of Aziz Ansari, when Babe ran that story on Aziz Ansari. Do you remember that?

Ben: That’s a real deep cut, babe.net.

Nayeema: Babe.net. They ran that piece on Aziz Ansari, and there was this huge spectrum of Me too stories from Harvey Weinstein obviously being the one that is most clear cut, and obviously there was a release of women’s fury when Donald Trump got elected. You saw it with the pussy hats and the Women’s March, and then you saw it in the Me Too movement. And then when it came to that babe.net story of Aziz Ansari, where he’d gone on this date, it created a conversation in the culture where I think people were like, is this Me Too? What’s Me Too? And it created a sense that the world had moved too far.

Ben: Yeah, it was a sense, in a way, that the media had gone too far. That babe.net was doing a story on, what I think a lot of people saw as, a really awful date rather than as a crime.

Nayeema: Yeah.

Ben: And it felt that the media had transgressed into beyond our space, I think.

Nayeema: Exactly.

Ben: That is part of what there’s a backlash to.

Nayeema: Yeah, it pushed people into the periphery. It made these conversations unacceptable in the mainstream, and so you see things like pick up the way you saw UFC pick up, and I think there’s some kind of parallel thing to this. And then, of course, Dana White is the person that ends up buying the UFC. He ends up getting venues with Trump, making this deal with Ari Emmanuel, and UFC becomes much bigger than Endeavor.

Ben: But so I think you start to see these currents run together in 2016, these cultural currents, these political currents, these huge new media venture in the form of UFC, whose CEO in 2016, Dana White, endorses Donald Trump, and who winds up introducing him at the 2024 Republican National Convention. It really is this incredible convergence of all these different things that we’ve been talking about.

Nayeema: And the convention, itself, just seems like, not just because you’re there, Ben, though, I’m sure it helps, it just seems like the manliest place on earth. They even played the Man’s World on stage the other day.

James Brown: This is a man’s world.

Ben: Yeah, that was my second favorite. The best is a video they’ve been playing over and over, a super cut of a Donald Trump dancing to YMCA.

Nayeema: Is that manly? Is that strength doing the YMCA?

Ben: Yeah. It’s a really interesting here because they’re both trying to project this very specific idea of masculinity, but also trying to expand what you’re allowed to be like as a Republican, which there’s a lot of basically secular culture, and it’s culture that’s not about traditional values that’s bleeding in, sometimes bothering some Republicans, actually.

Nayeema: But it is interesting because last week, we released a podcast about gender. We talked about the fight between traditional and modern gender roles for men and women as being the big story behind the 2024 election. We actually got some feedback that our episode was too heteronormative. Did you see that, Ben?

Ben: No, I totally missed that. But I’m glad that there’s still left wing media criticism out there.

Nayeema: But we talked about gender being the backbone of this election, and the next day, Axios obviously listening to our piece. I’m kidding. But they ran a story calling this the Boys versus Girls Election. And in polls, Donald Trump is up, by some accounts, at 27% with men, and his lead in these six swing states is owed largely to men. And it’s not just white men, it’s also Hispanic men, black men, and there, Semafor reporter, Kadia Goba did a fascinating story.

Ben: Yeah, she’s here with me in Milwaukee and let’s bring on to talk about it.

[Music]

Nayeema: Hi Kadia, thanks for being here.

Kadia Goba: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Ben: Kadia, it’s been so long.

Nayeema: Kadia, I love this piece. As you know, I slacked you right after. I was jealous it wasn’t in audio. And so now, finally, it is, you’re here. Explain when you learned that men, and particularly black men, were hot for Donald Trump.

Kadia: So it’s been a thing since the 80s or 90s, I just feel like people forgot that. And I guess setting out to do the piece, I’ve always had in the back of my head, you’re sadly mistaken if you think that he is not appealing to those people who featured him in his rap songs many years ago. I just thought it was something that never really was talked about during his last four years as presidency, and just wanted to explore that. But it never changed from the eighties. He’s always been a figure in that community.

Ben: Yeah, I think this started, right, with you saying, “I think I can get an interview with Trump.” And in a way, for me, the beginning of this story was you saying, “I think I have a pitch to the Trump campaign to talk to him.” And it ended with you saying, “Well, the interview was interesting, but not that newsy, but oh my God, this was the most insane reporting experience.” And I wonder if you could just walk through that a little bit.

Kadia: So it started with this other story I had done about black outreach. I was just trying to get a story about black outreach. So from then, the campaign was like, anything you need, we’ll help you out or whatever. And I came back to Ben, and Ben was like, “Well, you should probably ask him for an interview.” And I was like, “You know what? I think I could, and I think we should probably make this pitch about me understanding Donald Trump, working at Dooney and Bourke back in the day, in early nineties.”

Nayeema: Explain what Dooney and Bourke is.

Kadia: Dooney and Bourke is a handbag store, and I used to work in their retail shop. They had one of Madison Avenue and the other one was on the second floor of Trump Tower 57. It still exists, to be honest, but it was a high-end handbag store. A lot of tourists would come in specifically for Trump Tower, but also come into the store. This is a long time ago. We used to smoke cigarettes in the back of the store at that point. But you would always see Donald Trump, that was never a big deal. You would also see him in clubs. If you were cute enough to get into those fancy clubs with rappers, you would see him in there. It was not a big deal.

Nayeema: Which, Kadia, you were cute enough to get into those fancy clubs with rappers.

Kadia: Well, yes.

Nayeema: Obviously, I presume. Well, so you had this really interesting vantage point to Donald Trump, not as a reporter, but as someone in the orbit, a fly on the wall or a Nora Ephron wallflower at the orgy, kind of. Is that right?

Kadia: Yeah, and to your point, I just never understood why people never looked at how rappers or people from New York never talk shit about him, or they just was like, oh, wow. Even Russell Simmons, I remember clearly him saying, “That’s my man. I can’t believe he’s President or he’s running for president.” But yeah, that’s Donald, he’s cool. So I feel like people forgot about that Donald Trump.

Nayeema: I don’t think they just forgot about it, I think there was this characterization of Trump in the tabloid culture and his attacks on the Central Park Five as him being intensely racist and understood as that, when, in fact, you’re saying he was part of the fabric of the community.

Kadia: Very much part of the fabric of the community. And on that, he talks about his op-ed during the Central Park Five time, and he talks about, well, everyone thought they were guilty, at that point, and he was, it appears he was just going with the, not defending him or whatever, but it was a different time. That really didn’t become a thing until they were found not guilty. And then he was President, or at least running for President at the time. And then it was, oh, look at you, you racist. Why’d you do that?

Nayeema: So bring it back to this moment when Ben says you came to him and were like, “Oh, I think I get an interview.” You thought this was a bit of a good news story for Trump that no one was telling, his resonance in this community.

Kadia: Well certainly pay attention if you think that this group of people, Donald Trump appealed to a big group of people who voted for him, who thought they were underserved and not looked after or ignored, right? Guess what? A lot of people in the black community feel the same way. And because he has had this reputation, I wanted to dispel this myth that black people wouldn’t be attractive to him, as stories or polling had showed that he was gaining black support, especially among black men, which brings me to my story because I interview a bunch of black men.

Ben: So tell the story. Basically, you set out to get an interview with Donald Trump.

Kadia: Yeah.

Ben: How does that work? Is that a normal process of trying to get an interview?

Kadia: No, not at all. I always felt like they were going to give it to me. I know people were probably skeptical about that, but I go out and I’m like, so let me talk to Trump about his black outreach. And the campaign said, “Well, yeah, maybe we’ll think about it. Well, why don’t you just, first of all, you should probably talk to some people that he knew or he knows from that era.” And they were all New York celebrities. The first person I talked to was Darryl Strawberry, who was a iconic Met player. So that was the first person I talked to, which Trump and Darryl Strawberry, who puts those two together? But I set out to put those two together. These are some people who weren’t very political, but had this appreciation for Donald Trump and wanted to talk about it.

Nayeema: And so you’re doing, you’re getting all these Trump surrogates in sports world, and this kinship emerges with these black athletes who feel like Donald Trump represents them in some way. And I think Mike Tyson summed it up to you best in your written reporting. We actually have an audio clip of your conversation with him.

Mike Tyson: If I ever saw Donald Trump and didn’t know he was white, I would think that he was black the way they were treating him in the papers and in the press.

Nayeema: I would think he were black the way they were treating him. Is that a common thread? Does this community become strange bedfellows with Donald Trump because they have common cause of a fight against institutions like the press or the criminal justice system?

Kadia: Yeah, so as I’m interviewing these people, I’m also going to black conservative events and talking to just everyday workers or small business owners who are actually echoing the sentiment. So I didn’t feel like they were so far off.

Now about the criminal background thing. So to be clear, I have never heard a black man say, oh, I identify with him because he’s a criminal.

Nayeema: No, because he’s unfairly prosecuted by the criminal justice system.

Kadia: Because he says he’s unfairly prosecuted by the criminal justice system.

Nayeema: You’re right.

Kadia: And yes, many black men feel like they have also been shafted by the criminal justice system, whether they couldn’t afford a proper attorney or they just felt unfairly treated. So yeah, there’s a lot of identity there. It does not resonate well when the white man running for president says that, but when you hear it from other black men, I imagine it’s probably more believable.

Ben: Also, you spoke to my childhood hero, a former New York Giants linebacker, Lawrence Taylor, number 56, and he said this.

Lawrence Taylor: Just he going to speak his mind that he doesn’t care how it comes out. He’s not derogatory, but I mean, he is, I like him. He’s a man’s man. Yeah.

Ben: So what is he talking about? This man’s man line really stuck with me. What does that mean?

Kadia: Yeah, so I think in the black community or in the Hispanic community, people call him machismo or just showing strength, and that is something that resonates in the black community, whether you’re Lawrence Taylor and you make a lot of money or you’re just a young dude in the hood, if you have nothing, at the very least, you have strength. You can protect your family. It is something that is, I often hear a lot, and when I talk to a lot of people on the ground, black men on the ground, their sentiment was that the Democratic Party has really bolstered black women because Democrats famously say that black women saved the elections or voted Joe Biden, and they feel that they have been sidelined by that. And I remember one man telling me they already don’t have respect for us, now we’re losing our women. So this is a common thread in this particular community, which is my community, I guess.

Nayeema: Your reporting journey in this piece culminates with you getting this interview with Donald Trump that you thought you could get, and you did get, and you asked him about his appeal with black men. And from what I read in the piece, he replies saying, “They see what I’ve done and they see strength. They want strength, okay?” I wish I had his voice saying that because it probably sounds very different to mine, but talk about what he meant there. They see strength. They want strength because strength, that, itself, has this masculine quality and sales marketing to it, right?

Kadia: Yeah. It’s that bravado, I keep saying, that appeals to the black community, that is something I think people from that generation feel like it has been either demonized or maybe watered down. When we talk about equal rights, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but yes, this is something that men, especially from that era, and are feeling and also teaching other younger men that this is probably not how it used to be and things should change.

Ben: Just to take this back to the media story that we’re thinking about and the media spectacle that you and I are here, in Milwaukee, witnessing. You came out of all this reporting out of this flood of 1980s athletes calling you, and I’m curious here, as you see that Trump sell himself and sell himself through the media, do you see these threads? Do you see this case he’s making about gender, about masculinity?

Kadia: Well, sure, right. We see that when he talks about gender in sports and how a trans woman is not a woman, but also, since the shooting, a lot of what’s resonating on the stage right now is talking about him being this, our bold President Trump, and he has a new mantra of fight, fight, fight. That is something some might see as a bit aggressive, can’t wait until all this backlash happens in five years from now. But there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of hyper-masculinity, I think, coming forward. It’ll be interesting when I go back to the hill how this actually reshapes a lot of lawmakers and how they interact with us. But yeah, I do feel like I see it in front and center now.

Ben: You, in a way, we’re set out to write up a political story about his appeal and flickering in the polls to broaden his base among black voters. Here, we’ve been talking about how there are UFC fighters all over the place, there’s a lot of really broad shoulder guys showing up on that stage, and I’m curious if you see, is that part of the same push? Are these different elements of his campaign?

Kadia: I do think so. Didn’t we just hear that Hulk Hogan is introducing him or something. That’s insane, right?

Ben: Yeah. What is that about?

Kadia: Masculinity. You know what I mean? Playing into that, if you think about Danes telling me, which JD Vance could get lunch bucket Democrats, what is a lunch bucket Democrats, the guy that goes to the steel mill? It is romanticizing this bravado, and I think it’s going to continue and just going to be very interesting.

Ben: Got all the heroes of my youth here, Hulk Hogan, Lawrence Taylor. I have to revisit my whole political orientation.

Nayeema: You’re in the right place there, in Milwaukee.

Kadia: Look at one of his spokespeople, like Steven Chung. He’s a former UFC fighter, right?

Ben: It’s an incredible career path.

Kadia: Yeah.

Ben: He thought you had a weird career, Kadia.

Kadia: Exactly.

Nayeema: Probably prepares you, like working at Dooney and Bourke prepares you for reporting on Trump. I think UFC probably prepares you for dealing with the press for him. Do you think he’s also appealing, that strength is also appealing to women? Because Ben and I were discussing last week’s episode, the nostalgia, the aesthetic fantasy of this trad wife movement. Some people looking for more traditional gender roles, the challenge of finding men that are strong and protective. And the Cut recently had some polling that showed that Trump had about 21%, about a fifth of the vote from black women aged 18 to 34. Is that something that surprises you or?

Kadia: I don’t know. So on my reporting this out, like I said, I was going to a bunch of conservative events, I won’t forget, a young woman stood up and said that she felt like she had diminished her man so much that she had to do some real introspective looks inside to regroup, and she stood up in front. It was at a cigar bar, and she stood up and made this testimony. So yeah, I guess this is part of that. It would be some really good reporting to actually hash that out, but I haven’t. That stood out to me and matched the story I was doing for that day. But yeah, I would imagine that’s probably, I don’t know, how do you square that with equal pay and equal rights? I don’t know how that happens.

Nayeema: Abortion.

Kadia: And abortion, agency over your own body, I don’t know how that squares. I don’t know if the country is ready to be that split. It’s interesting, though. It’s worth the threat of reporting, right?

Nayeema: Sounds like Kadia’s next assignment.

Ben: Yeah. I think you tapped such a deep vein here. Really, really interesting. And I think it’s honestly, it’s so interesting to think about it. The other amazing status that Trump leads particularly far among divorced men, which makes complete sense. But can you just close this out here just with a reality check, Trump’s going to get destroyed among black voters, isn’t it?

Kadia: Yeah. So to be clear, the Democratic Party still has, polling is saying 80 something now, because the assumption is that he’s going to gain a bit of black voters. I do not see that. You know what? I am not going to make a call here.

Ben: But no predictions.

Kadia: No, no predictions. It would be interesting if that happened, but I would say black people, men and women, are going to overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

Ben: A marginal shift can change the election. But just to keep this all in context, it does feel like, I don’t know, you’ve just tapped into what’s, I think, a really deep, long-term trend in America, whether or not it plays out in November. So anyway, thank you so much for this arduous reporting project of talking to every sports figure that I was obsessed with in the 80s. We’re not going to discuss whether I asked you to get anybody’s autograph, which would be profoundly unethical.

Nayeema: Oh God, Ben, LT’s? Was it LT’s?

Ben: No comment.

Nayeema: Well, thank you so much, Kadia for being here.

Ben: Thanks, Kadia.

Nayeema: She’s just great.

Ben: Yeah, I know, she’s incredible journalist, and that was just one of the great insane reporting projects, just took every possible turn. Although, I don’t think we came in thinking it was particularly a story about men, and it really became that. But really, through the comments of these guys who have known Trump for a long time, and I think the reason this was so relevant conversation is just look at the choices the Republican Party’s making in how to present Trump and the crucial night of the convention that is really surrounded by these ultra masculine figures from the 80s, particularly, as Kadia noted, Hulk Hogan. Amazing.

Nayeema: Hulk Hogan. Well, it is a real moment in the manosphere for Donald Trump. And one thing that’s been shocking to me in this election is how in recent weeks, months, it’s just been people who were closeted, Trump supporters, have been very comfortable coming out in places like Silicon Valley, especially as he’s moved on crypto. And I’m curious if you’ll see that in minority communities, as well, especially after this assassination attempt, more comfort coming out of the closet for Trump.

Ben: Yeah, people like to be with a winner and he looks like a winner right now. That’s probably the biggest factor of all.

Nayeema: It’s because he’s manly you think he looks like a winner, Ben.

Ben: Because he’s winning.

Nayeema: All right, let’s take a quick break and we will be back with Blind Spots with Max Tani.

[Music]

Nayeema: We are back and it’s raining men. Max Tani is here. Max, you’re in Milwaukee, which Ben has described as the happiest place on earth. Your take, are you happy?

Max Tani: It’s definitely got a calmer energy than I was expecting. I think in part because there’s just so much positive political news out there for Trump, which is a weird thing to say a week when someone tried to assassinate him. But I think that the general mood here, on the ground, is giddy. There’s a lot less of the people singling out the media and saying, oh, these people are dishonest. Usually when you walk around these types of things, people will look at your badge and they’ll see that you’re press or whatever, something like that, and maybe some people make a little comment about one thing or another, but I haven’t gotten that a single time, which is really strange, and it’s different than even when I was at a Trump rally in February and other recent instances. People here just feel like they’re going to win. They have nothing to be angry about, from the media’s perspective.

Ben: Do you think we’re going to love them back if they, maybe, we know now that they love us?

Max: Isn’t JD Vance’s whole thing built on the idea that the liberal media after Trump was just trying to figure out the Trump voter and to understand them and mythologizing them? I think we’ve already done that, to a certain degree.

Nayeema: Yeah, there you go. There was a lot of backlash on that the first time around, but I think we are in a happy place. You become happier. Let’s see if it trickles into your reporting, Max, and you get deeply embedded with the religious right.

Ben: And it is true that JD Vance, right, is a media creation, in a lot of ways. The publishing industry and then Cable TV really just love that guy.

Nayeema: But Blind Spots this week, Max, I was actually like, should we even do Blind Spots this week? Because, it’s so, it seems like everybody’s consuming all the news this week. The left and the right, there is a convergence in the story. The stories are so big, not the valence, but the stories are so big that you could be watching any channel and you’re talking about the same things.

Max: That is a good point. People are paying a lot of attention to the news this week. You see that in the ratings for certain cable channels, you see that in the fact that people are just, generally, in your life, probably are just talking more about the news. So in some ways, yes, it’s an appropriate week not to do Blind Spots, but in other ways, weeks when there are big stories that dominate the headlines and that everybody’s paying attention to, it means that there is a lot of other stuff that’s still going on, but just people aren’t necessarily paying that much attention.

Nayeema: So what are some of the stories we’re not seeing? What is the Blind Spot on the right, for example?

Max: Yeah, the Blind Spot on the right this week is, strangely, Kim Gilfoyle’s, RNC speech. Now, let me say why that is. So, while other cable networks, like CNN, carried most of Gilfoyle’s Wednesday address on the RNC floor, Mediaite noted that Fox News actually cut away from the speech. Instead, opting to interview a dog in the audience.

Nayeema: They interviewed a dog?

Max: So basically, as soon as Kim Gilfoyle, who is Donald Trump Jr’s fiance and a former Fox News anchor, as soon as she was introduced on stage, the network cut to a man on the street interview, and someone interviewed some delegates, and someone interviewed some delegates, and the man on the street interviewed some delegate’s dog. And instead of cutting back after that interview to the speech, they cut instead to an interview that Sean Hannity was doing with Eric Trump, which was interesting. And it was a pretty unsubtle snub of Gilfoyle who, for those who don’t remember, was a host on Fox and was fired from Fox for inappropriate behavior.

Ben: Oh my God, that’s right. I had forgotten.

Max: Yeah, that’s an old Fox scandal. It got a pretty interesting and fun dynamic that’s playing out here, at the RNC this year, which is that you’ve got all of these former Fox News personalities who’ve been fired, but continue to be important in the conservative media world and have some sway in Trump world, who are just wandering around and they’re bumping into some of their former bosses. Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox more recently, was seen walking past Rupert Murdoch, and it was awkward for them. And so it’s one of these really interesting situations where it’s a little bit uncomfortable.

Nayeema: It’s like a weird family reunion.

Max: Yes, exactly.

Nayeema: Or there has been major divorces and scandal, et cetera.

Ben: The Republican Party is in this open and forgiving mood and trying to bring in the apostate. It’s like Nikki Haley, but Fox, it sounds like, not so much.

Max: Folks at Fox, some of them have long memories of old, they’re not so great at letting go of grudges, for better and for worse. And also, once you leave the Fox family, I think it’s difficult to come back in. And one of the other interesting dynamics, and the last point I feel like I’ll make about this is, this is the best week of the year for Fox people. Every Fox personality, no matter how minor, is just completely mobbed. Everywhere you walk around here, they’re all walking around with security and they’re just like total rock stars. It would be like if Taylor Swift or I don’t know, someone maybe moderately less famous was walking down the street to huge mobs.

Nayeema: And you guys don’t need security there, Ben or Max, not one of you…

Ben :No. That’s what it’s like for us in Sun Valley.

Nayeema: Is it?

Ben: I’ve never been to Sun Valley.

Nayeema: Oh, yeah. I like Sun Valley.

Max: I will say I do. I have been stopped a few times, but it’s mostly by news PR people who are upset with me about one various thing or another, a story, usually.

Nayeema: They know how to hold a grudge. The other Blind Spot in the story, by the way, just for a second, is that Kimberly Gilfoyle, former, you said she’s an ex Fox news host, current Donald Trump, Jr. girlfriend, also ex of Gavin Newsom.

Max: Of course.

Ben: If we can get that guy onto the ticket, that’ll be a great storyline.

Nayeema: I’m just saying, part of the trend of women moving to the right, I would say Kimberly Gilfoyle, right there. So tell us about the other Blind Spot, Max. What else are people not seeing?

Max: Yeah, many people on the left this week likely were not watching the Charlie Kirk show on YouTube, and they can be forgiven for not doing so. In that case, they may have missed an interview that Turning Points USA founder, Charlie Kirk, did with Vivek Ramaswamy. Can we say he’s a friend of the pod or are we not supposed to say that?

Ben: Oh, for sure, for sure.

Max: Yeah. Friend of the pod, Vivek Ramaswamy. And during that interview, the quote was, after the assassination attempt on Trump, “If you are a man and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you are not a man.” And I think it gets at what you guys were talking about earlier, which is Donald Trump’s deep appeal to men and the ways in which it’s dominating the entire RNC, down to the smallest YouTube media conservative media host.

Ben: It’s so interesting because it’s the understory, right? It’s not what political journalists spend their days writing about, even if it is what Nayeema’s spends her days obsessing about, but-

Nayeema: It is. I’ve been early to this story, I’m telling you.

Ben: Yeah, but don’t you think that deep gender story so present here?

Nayeema: I think it’s not shocking at all to anyone who’s in the dating world because you just see how the shifting gender roles have changed. And you see all these, a lot of people talk about this, but a lot of men who feel like they can’t find partners, a lot of incel community. This has been a decades long story, and Donald Trump has just smartly tapped into it, I think, and they have found they’re a fearless leader here.

Max: The one thing that I think is also really interesting, too, from a media perspective is the way in which, and this is something I was wrong about. A few years ago when TP USA became something that was on the rise and Charlie Kirk had some money to start the organization, it was aimed at millennial conservatives and particular millennial conservative men. I laughed it off a little bit. I thought young people are always going to be much more liberal and they’ll follow the trend and become more conservative as they grow up. But I think Charlie Kirk and some of these people have actually proved us wrong in the sense that not only do you see in the polls that younger men are more receptive to the right, but also, it’s been a not unsuccessful media venture, and they’ve been able to build these media companies aimed at, essentially, young bros obsessed with the idea of masculinity.

Ben: Yeah, there’s a whole space that runs from Ben Shapiro to Charlie Kirk to that Mogwarts Academy GQ wrote about recently for young men.

Nayeema: I feel it’s actually in the podcasting world. I, at the gym, will always ask dudes the podcast they’re listening to when.

Ben: So in a way, this has been good for your dating life?

Nayeema: Usually someone talks to me and they’re like, “Oh, you do a podcast?” And I’ll ask them what podcast they listen to, and I tend to really not know many of the podcasts that they’re listening to, and then check them out. And fascinating. Yesterday I was talking to somebody who was telling me about a podcast where they had just had a very similar conversation to ours about a woman had come on talking about the desire to go back to traditional gender roles.

Max: I think the other interesting thing here is the etiquette around talking to people at the gym, and whether or not it’s you’re interrupting someone’s workout. To me, I find it to be one of the most socially confusing places in the world because I like to have a completely solo experience, but sometimes I run into people, I’m chatting, am I interrupting their workouts? It’s interesting you feel, Nayeema, though, that?

Nayeema: I have a no approach. I would not talk to somebody at the gym unless I wanted to know how much longer they’re going to be on a machine. But I will say that men do hit on women on the gym, at the gym. That does still happen.

Max: Yes.

Nayeema: Maybe there’s something about the masculinity of that environment where men will feel comfortable chatting to you in that environment.

Ben: And they’re probably listening to podcasts just that are helping them game it out.

Nayeema: To like, bro, come on. Come on, girl, bro, it’s time to chat to that girl.

Max: Well, you’re feeling pumped up. I don’t know. You’re feeling good about yourself, maybe. Maybe just added five pounds on the weight rack. I listened to mixed signals at the gym, actually. One of the last episodes I listened to it.

Nayeema: That’s clutch.

Ben: Our producers are losing it.

Nayeema: I’m going to say we’re going to wrap right there, and got to hit the gym. Got to get hit on. Got to go, guys.

Thanks for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Max Tani, Allison Rodgers, Sheena Ozaki, Alan Haburchak, and Andrea López-Cruzado, with special thanks to Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garett Wiley, and Jules Zirn. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Billy Libby.

Our public editor, I feel like this week, we’ve had a lot of men, was going to say it’s Katy Perry, whose new single, Woman’s World, was not played at the RNC. Almost wasn’t played anywhere. Max, do you hear it? It’s been a bit of a pause.

Max: I did and I watched the video. You know what? I’m entertained. But yeah, it seems like she’s a bit cashed.

Nayeema: Sad. I love Katy Perry. Anyways, Katy Perry, we do it for you. If you like our show, please follow us wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review.

Ben: If you’re watching us on YouTube, please hit subscribe to our channel.

Max: And remember to subscribe to Semafor’s Media newsletter, which publishes every Sunday evening.