RadixJournal - March 13, 2026


True Lies

Topics
trump politics youth impressions Trump's decision-making ambiguity
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Donald Trump Dukakis George Herbert Walker Bush Hillary Clinton Brett Weinstein Ronald Reagan William Hurtling Philip McCain Obama Kant
The Center of the Universe Why Legal Immigration Is The Real Problem

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

150.82

Word count

2,282

Sentence count

59

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss an article written by Philip Kuchta about Donald Trump's early years in politics. We talk about how he became interested in politics when he was a kid, and how that led him to write an article about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So, Philip, tell us a little bit about yourself, and then we can start talking about this article you wrote.
00:00:10.700 Well, I'm a student.
00:00:13.000 I'm, like, studying philosophy.
00:00:15.700 I can tell that, yeah.
00:00:16.800 Yeah, you can tell from the topic or the vernacular of the article.
00:00:21.020 um i'm interested in uh you know obviously like power dynamics and um how politics kind of
00:00:32.900 conceals itself i think trump himself is like emblematic of the the kind of character of the
00:00:40.320 age um you do see the marriage of um politics with um with entertainment i know that's trite
00:00:48.400 but uh yeah it we belabored the point that yeah we have the reality tv star as sitting in the 0.63
00:00:55.980 office uh but there's actually a lot of significance of in this that um people kind of overlook
00:01:02.680 yeah or they fall into these traps um and so i i think it's worth of course um like delving a
00:01:12.840 little deeper into the issue at hand here definitely maybe uh my article just kind of
00:01:20.080 an opener for a can of worms yeah i agree i thought it was a great big picture look at trump and it
00:01:29.620 can the ideas in there can kind of be applied in a lot of uh different ways yeah let me do this
00:01:35.200 before we get the conversation started um i'll just put the art of the lengthy article in the
00:01:40.160 chat it's actually in the um scratch pad uh for today but just in case you haven't seen it you
00:01:48.300 can check it out and maybe read it uh at length so let me let me start out by bringing you back
00:01:58.560 a little bit i met i imagine you're in your early 20s if you're i am yes okay so 10 years wow
00:02:06.380 so when trump came on the scene you were like 10 i was in middle school
00:02:12.920 okay well i want to ask this seriously when you're in um when you're in like fifth or sixth
00:02:19.720 grade or whatever what was your impression of the whole thing because i i have a i have a child who
00:02:25.660 was who is your age back then that's the right way of putting it and she does have a kind of
00:02:33.240 sense of who trump is and she actually even has opinions on trump but what what was it like being
00:02:38.080 that young and trump coming on the scene was it just politics adult stuff or was there something
00:02:44.600 special i don't think i was all that interested in it to be honest um i was kind of i think caught
00:02:52.780 off guard by his election um uh but uh apart from being kind of this like news event that was
00:03:01.560 particularly unexpected um i don't think i gave it really much thought actually um and of course
00:03:09.680 you'd like see headlines about um you know he says this new thing that's um got everyone uh
00:03:15.720 turned inside out um but for me it wasn't uh i wasn't um it wasn't really focused on it to be
00:03:23.280 honest it's understandable i i can remember my for the first election that i was sort of aware of
00:03:30.440 I can vaguely remember my sister watching television and seeing Ronald Reagan on the television.
00:03:36.960 This is sort of how old I am.
00:03:38.440 But the first one that I sort of followed to some degree was George Herbert Walker Bush versus Dukakis.
00:03:46.960 And I remember there was this dynamic where all of our teachers were voting for Dukakis because, you know, there's, you know, liberal, you know, bias, basically.
00:03:55.980 Or I shouldn't even say bias, just liberal tendency among that profession.
00:04:00.440 But I did sort of resonate with Republicans very early on.
00:04:04.840 I kind of resonated with the right wing, even though I'm not sure I even knew about any issue or something like that.
00:04:13.860 But that type of politics seems extremely stayed in comparison to Trump.
00:04:21.460 And obviously there were some dirty politics about that campaign that had the famous Willie Horton ad, you know, race baiting Southern strategy galore.
00:04:29.420 But there is something different. First off, we're saturated by politics in a way. Young people are saturated by politics in a way that they weren't previously. You would have to go and sit down and watch the news to learn about what's going on in the election or read a newspaper, which we certainly weren't doing.
00:04:48.740 And now there's there is a kind of pop culture quality to Trump that, you know, Trump's name would be evoked in some of these totally stupid, like mumble rap songs. 0.97
00:05:03.320 And, you know, like, oh, Donald Trump, like just just I'm just making that up. 0.99
00:05:09.060 But you you get my point.
00:05:10.060 Like he was a he was an icon of reality television show star.
00:05:13.820 Even before he went on The Apprentice, he was sort of a reality television show star.
00:05:19.520 I guess your youth has inspired me to reminisce here.
00:05:21.860 But I knew about Trump when I was a kid because my I would go with my mother to the to the grocery store to go shopping.
00:05:28.740 and i kept up with his love affair with marla maples just by reading the covers of you know
00:05:36.400 people magazine and the national inquirer or something i i kind of knew what was going on he
00:05:41.980 was in my mind you know even at a young age he's always been a reality show star for his entire
00:05:49.800 life and even before he did an actual reality show um but uh yeah i mean so i i so i and then
00:06:00.400 now the young people are kind of like saturated with pop you know tiktok videos or whatever
00:06:04.640 they're saturated um with that kind of thing so do you think that we can never go back that
00:06:12.960 politics sort of must be a reality show going forward or do you think that this is a you know
00:06:22.300 an aberration um i think it's left a primitive impact i don't think we're going to see like
00:06:30.500 a figure to the breadth and extremity of trump like in the near future actually i think he's like
00:06:37.380 kind of a once in a blooming figure, but I think he's left like an indelible mark on
00:06:43.620 at least how politics appears to people, how politics is interpreted, how politicians are
00:06:49.380 interpreted. I do remember when I was like very little, I heard about McCain's defeat to Obama
00:06:59.940 and I didn't know anything about politics and maybe this was me regurgitating, you know,
00:07:07.020 my parents opinions um uh but i did i kind of had the impression that obama was like boring
00:07:14.780 he didn't really do anything he talked a lot he was kind of like a community organizer
00:07:20.340 um but he wasn't kind of decisive um and um i think the funny thing about trump is
00:07:29.680 he's equally he's not decisive either in a way but he kind of pretends to be
00:07:35.660 and so everyone is and supporters especially uh critics too are left in like this moment of
00:07:44.520 suspense that never actually ends so the final decision this kind of schmittian decision never
00:07:51.640 actually arrives but we're always waiting for it um you know i i think that is very true because
00:07:59.700 you can't really understand what the policy is and i think there's a way in which he has a natural
00:08:08.800 instinct to allow that to happen because he has a natural instinct to be all things to all people
00:08:14.600 um and you know there is there is a degree to him that is polemical where you know he calls out the
00:08:21.140 fake news media and says the democrats are evil whatever i get that but in his heart of hearts i
00:08:27.300 I do think he sincerely desires to be loved.
00:08:31.200 I think maybe that's his fundamental desire,
00:08:33.960 maybe his only desire.
00:08:36.040 And there's a way in which
00:08:39.240 even something like the Iran war,
00:08:41.760 where it's sort of ambiguous in a way
00:08:44.740 that other things weren't previously.
00:08:47.060 You know, what are we doing there?
00:08:49.380 Are we engaging in regime change?
00:08:52.840 Are we knocking them
00:08:54.960 so they don't get nuclear weapons?
00:08:56.440 Are we going to pull out? Are we going to stay there for the long haul? Is this for Israel? Is this for me? I mean, it's sort of all of that. And he says different things to different at different times to different audiences. And there's just this sort of ambiguity that I think is strategic on some instinctual level. 0.67
00:09:17.380 Like, this is how he operates, is to never make a decision or to sort of be all things to all people or to be a kind of screen in which you can project fantasies and things like that.
00:09:29.460 Well, I don't think we could say he intends it in a way that, like, we might have this idea of a politician as, like, a strategist who kind of intends ambiguity.
00:09:44.100 like i think it is instinctual with trump and maybe it's uh derives from his you know
00:09:50.060 desire to be white to be popular to everyone um but i think that's what's also interesting it's
00:09:57.920 like uh you know in the article uh i use uh you know kantian uh ideas to kind of present this uh
00:10:06.840 this picture of trump that we have and that a lot of people have um you know beneath the skin
00:10:12.400 beneath the the media's um shimmer and as like someone who's uh making decisions intentionally
00:10:21.080 and posturing a certain way because he has this kind of inner dialogue um this like inner
00:10:27.140 personality um maybe he's like particularly pernicious as a evil vicious person or maybe
00:10:33.940 he's um he's actually trying to do the right thing but he's restrained by his advisors or something
00:10:39.640 um uh this is all projection upon trump that um it reveals more about the interpreter than
00:10:48.700 trump who's being interpreted right and uh there's no thing in itself there's only the
00:10:54.100 perception of the thing we that's the only thing we can ever get from him yeah well that you have
00:10:58.860 of course like the noumena which is the thing behind perception behind uh you know um the
00:11:06.820 imposition of you know these concepts that we have in i guess in kantian language uh you know
00:11:13.100 you'd say uh forms of the understanding that structure our experience uh but it's like what
00:11:20.020 what a lot of people are trying to do who are you know plan trusters or panicans what they're trying
00:11:24.920 to do is read uh some kind of inner strategy motive or intention into the phenomenon and this
00:11:33.800 is kind of like uh you know metaphysical speculation insofar as it's like for Kant
00:11:39.300 we can't actually uh reach beyond the phenomena yeah reason is is constrained to what uh the
00:11:47.340 information that is structured by you know sensibility and intuitions um but we nonetheless
00:11:54.780 have a desire to um because it kind of also it's also exacerbated by the fact that there's a
00:12:01.420 contradiction on the surface and so how do we restore coherence we kind of uh we project our
00:12:08.820 own uh i guess um formulations upon in order to make sense of it all uh so we can kind of uh
00:12:16.680 achieve a semblance of coherence in interpreting him but i think this also plays into kind of
00:12:23.680 trump's uh trump's interests and that you know he can be equally accessible to everyone he can
00:12:32.300 build these vast coalitions without ever really committing to a particular point or or will be
00:12:39.360 um and so like i said i think that ties into what you were what you were saying earlier he's like
00:12:45.740 he's anyone to everyone yeah um this makes him a really good campaigner as well uh i mean but it's
00:12:53.680 It's problematic when you actually have to govern because you kind of have to make decisions.
00:12:59.360 That's the way – if you're going to make policies, if you're going to undertake the labor of governance, you have to exclude some people.
00:13:10.780 There's a lot I want to pick up on there, but I'll just start with this.
00:13:17.740 One sense that I have with Trump is that he's sort of constantly campaigning, and the MAGA coalition is constantly on the ouse.
00:13:31.440 And what I mean by this is that so much of the Trump coalition in 2016 and 2020 and 2024, the coalitions, we should say, because a lot of boomers died, a lot of new people came in. 0.69
00:13:46.580 And it's this sort of grab bag, a basket of deplorables, you could say, using Hillary Clinton's language of anti-government animosity, which is very ironic.
00:14:01.080 Like in 2020, and it was sort of early COVID at that point, but you still had the makings of people being like, I want to get out of my house.
00:14:10.660 I'm not wearing a mask and all that kind of stuff that they were voting for Trump in 2024.
00:14:16.040 Before, it was the anti-vax coalition.
00:14:18.780 I remember Brett Weinstein had this, like, heady, transcendental movement of some kind.
00:14:26.480 I have no earthly idea what exactly they were advocating for.
00:14:29.600 But it was like, with 2020, we got 2020 vision of the evils of the deep state and, you know, something like that.
00:14:38.880 They were all voting for Trump.
00:14:40.680 All the podcast bros who were liberal five years ago or libertarian or even left leftist are voting for Trump.
00:14:51.020 There's this this combination of anti-government energy that coalesces into these coalitions.
00:15:00.640 And I don't think he can win without that.
00:15:04.020 He's sort of like the anti-candidate.
00:15:06.360 That's when he's at his best.