Where to Find the Avuncular Donald Trump? Check the Manosphere.
The New York Times
In the months leading up to the election, Donald J. Trump sat for a slew of casual and unconventional conversations with podcasters and streamers. We watched them all.
Donald Trump, the 45th and soon to be 47th president of the United States, is a talker — a relentless one, a stubborn one, often a cruel one, sometimes a droll one. The dominant sound and strategy of the biggest American political upheavals of the last decade may well be his always-on faucet of speech.
So it’s noteworthy when someone accustomed to dominating communication encounters another person who is able to set the conversational rhythm and tone.
This was the scenario a few weeks ago during his appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, “This Past Weekend.” Von, a former reality-television personality and a popular comedian, is an earnestly naïve conversationalist whose chats are nonlinear, sometimes provocative, very often funny and rhythmically all over the place. He wasn’t attempting to unsettle the former president, but somehow, zigzagging through topics, that’s what happened. He asked Trump about his children and their relationship with Trump’s father. He noted that the audio quality of Trump’s X conversation with Elon Musk wasn’t very good.
Most importantly, Von spoke candidly about his own battles with addiction — “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie,” instantly entered the political-interview hall of fame. That line of conversation seemed to soften Trump, who doesn’t drink or use drugs, and whose older brother, Fred, struggled with alcoholism. Often Trump seemed as if he were watching Von with a blend of shock and concern. At the end of their hourlong conversation, he left Von with an awkwardly phrased blessing: “Good luck with your situation,” by which he meant Von’s recovery journey. It was almost sweet.
This was one of a number of unusual conversations Trump had in the presidential campaign’s closing weeks, part of a new strategy: Skip most mainstream media and head straight into the manosphere, the loose caucus of podcasters, livestreamers, social media stars and other outlier media figures who have heavily monopolized online discourse lately. In the two months leading up to the election, Trump sat for conversations with at least eight podcasters and streamers — all male, many under 35, notionally politically curious, sometimes puerile and unserious, and sometimes spiteful and scabrous.
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