Trump, the Man's Man at the RNC, AKA the Happiest Place on Earth 55:12

You're terrifying. I can't remember being woken up by the hotel room phone. That was like four minutes ago. And I say I'm not a morning person. So if I'm up in the morning and you're not here, I'm 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. They're very generous with hotel ratings these days.

Hi, I'm Ben Smith. I'm Naeem Araza. And this is Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. What a week. Oh, what a week. Last week has been nonstop for politics. It's been nonstop for media. And there are kind of 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 kind of a 24-7 news cycle alongside what feels like

kind of 24-10 or like 28-10 social media cycle of speculation, raising questions and conspiracizing on both the left and the right. Yeah. There's also this heavily covered Republican National Convention where the bearded J.D. Vance has been anointed running mate and where the non-bearded Ben Smith is covering for Semaphore. Ben, how is Milwaukee? It is the happiest place on earth. You know, I, like a lot of journalists, came to Milwaukee yesterday

I think genuinely worried that people here hated media so much that it was going to be like slightly scary. And what we instead found were people who I've just never, I've been to probably 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. There's no, any internal divisions in the party have basically been purged.

So it's this MAGA celebration with a little, you know, thread of belief that Donald Trump was, you know, spared essentially by God from, you know, from this horrible assassination attempt. So people are even being nice to journalists is sort of the outcome of that. Yeah. Well, he is, as we played in a song that Max Taney gave us, the chosen one.

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. 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 mean, I don't know, are they praying for him or are they laughing about that? They're laughing. I was sitting in the Grand Hotel here where all the campaign staff stay, the senior ones, when it flashed on Fox News, which is all of the screens, and

that Biden had COVID and it was like, I feel like the reaction was sort of incredulous/sympathetic laughter. I mean, it was just like, are you kidding?

But I mean, again, it feels kind of biblical. The walls seem to be really closing in around him with Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries pressing him to get out. And then Semaphore had this big scoop the other day where Jeffrey Katzenberg is telling Biden that the money is running dry. This three weeks, I think, you know, took an election that journalists were spending a lot of time complaining was boring and predictable into the most, you know, sort of the kind of politics that you would

that would make a laughable West Wing script that nobody would believe.

beginning with rising pressure, which is like 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 kind of miraculous survival, and the Republican arrival in Milwaukee for the MAGA coronation. You talk about it being some kind of West Wing script, but it also has...

It has this, like, 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 pros, 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 and 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? I think I'm going to dodge that question. But an incredible image. And yeah, I mean, I think the, I mean, in some sense, the media story is it is these deep connections between this new both kind of online media of figures, by the way, like Joe Rogan, who was a martial arts fighter. Which is actually the best training for interviewing, I think. Yeah.

I guess that worked out. You just get hit in the head a lot and then it improves your skills. You know, and Trump's connection with the UFC. I mean, remember right after his conviction in New York, he went to a UFC fight.

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. I do. Well, I don't know if I feel it, but I don't think I'm the intended audience. Sure. They'll be glad to have you. Let's take a quick break to meditate on the manliness of Donald Trump and unpack it when we're back.

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 Smith. Where were you? I was at home scrambling. 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. I mean, I think a lot of people in Trump's orbit actually found it maybe shocking, but not surprising. I 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 out there like, oh, like everybody's just kind of creating clickbait. But there seemed to be this kind of shyness of the media to come in here, a little bit of kind of self-censorship. And then also, again,

If you say the wrong thing, you will be pounced on. Aren't you afraid to say the wrong thing? Shouldn't you be? I mean, do you not feel that? As we tape this? Sure. Somebody tried to assassinate the former president. Don't you think it's like worth being a little, I mean, I don't know. Are you worried, Ben, about saying the wrong thing? No, I mean, you'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 Semaphore and why it happened and how sort of meaningful political actors were responding, which was sometimes very responsibly, sometimes in totally lunatic ways. Yeah.

So got a piece of like guidance on how to cover this from the top aide to Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder. And then this aide, Dimitri Melhorn's advice was to really seriously consider the possibility that it was a Putin-style staged attack. I mean...

people had some very strange and kind of revealing reactions. Revealing of their own biases or what they wanted to see. It was like a Rochard 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. The most cautious elements of kind of the big corporate media, I think,

were particularly concerned. I mean, NBC, Universal, told the people at Morning Joe that they had some other feed they wanted to air and

and kept them off the air on Monday morning, I think Max learned basically because they were afraid they might say something inflammatory or be insufficiently sympathetic to the former president. Yeah, something insensitive. And, you know, Joe Scarborough was just furious about that when he realized that he had been tricked off the air at this huge news moment. We have a clip of that. Let's play that clip.

Next time we're told there's going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs. We'll be sitting here. Yeah, and the news feed will be us or they can get somebody else to host the show. Oh.

Wow. Yeah. Joe Misha, not very happy. I mean, 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, I mean, I actually, it seemed unfair in my view. You or your panelists, presumably. Yeah. There has been a much more long running battle between Donald Trump and the media. You know, 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. We'll let that pass. But thanks for checking. 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 kind of chilling effect. Yeah, I mean, it's a very dark, scary moment. And I think people in the media reacted with a kind of caution that was both

just sort of appropriate. We don't know what's going on. It's a genuine crisis. Like the take economy can pause for a minute.

But also I think like a real physical fear. You know, 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 were screaming at the journalists, you did this. I mean, this is a highly charged environment. People in the crowd are injured, hit. I mean, they're rushing to get out. There is actually a shot taken by an attendee, Corey Comparatore, the volunteer firefighter.

Another military veteran is also severely injured in this. It's a very charged moment. I imagine people are really fearful. But the fact that they turned to the media that were there and blamed them, that's very revealing, right? Yeah, I mean, 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, you know, I do not think that anybody in the media was rooting for Donald Trump to get shot. And there was a thread of, you know, the folks who really support Trump really deeply believe 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... The daughter, Allison. 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. I mean, 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, you know, she's been told things about the media that aren't true. Well, yeah, that one really broke my heart. That is just an unimaginable loss. He's certainly, you know, 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 kind of distrust of

Of the media, this kind of bifurcation, and Ohio's junior senator and now Trump's veep also kind of chimed in. J.D. Vance didn't blame the media, but blamed Biden, you know, 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. 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. Yeah. And yet one corner of the media, like Twitter X, like a lot of people thought when Elon Musk took over Twitter that it was going to fade into some kind of, you know, backdrop. A lot of journalists left the platform, you know, out of concerns of how he's running it and lack of content moderation, et cetera. And yet in moments like this, like Twitter really takes off. It's still the live conversation, although...

You know, also kind of a disaster area. Staged was immediately trending. The word, the notion that it was staged, some poor Italian soccer journalist said,

got named as the shooter and millions of impressions of blue check marks. Not a particularly functioning place, but very important. The AI feature Grok was pushing out a Twitter moment, headlines suggesting that Kamala Harris was shot because the AI was kind of feeding into, you know, 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 Iaccarino kind of 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. You know, really a big moment for Twitter, for misinformation, for conspiracizing. But I think it's really important to say this was happening on both sides of the equation. Yeah, 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

have now learned to not trust anything, which is its own obvious problem. But then also this hugely valuable kind of user-generated content that comes out in these moments as well, which is a new part of news. Did you find the user-generated content valuable? I mean, 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 was valuable

Actually, it was more journalism. Yeah, I think it is the journalism, but it's analysis. That content comes from somewhere, right? Like, I think that you... Like, Bellingcat, these platforms that make sense of all the social noise that's out there. The New York Times visual investigations team, Malky Brown. Like, they just did a visual analysis coming from all these different videos that have been posted online. And I think that there is, like, useful information coming out of the noise. It just takes...

it takes some interpretation, right? Yeah, like our job is to filter it in a way. Exactly. So it plays a part. But a lightning round before we move on. One, I'm saddened to join you in Milwaukee, Ben. What is the vibe of...

Yeah, I mean, 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, you know, 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 party is entirely belongs to Donald Trump. But they're also very chanting J.D. Vance, J.D. Vance.

J.D. Vance has been announced. He's, 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, you know, the base that comes from this Appalachian heritage and this Midwestern background, but also the elite, like he went to Yale. And Donald Trump has never really fit into either of those worlds in the right way, and J.D. Vance does that. How's the reaction been to him? You know, 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. Yeah.

Yeah, 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 compelling ticket. Like you have Melania Trump, who is a model...

comes from the certain background of 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. Yeah. I think like a very relatable figure, I think, to people like you and me, which is to say you can just see how much they kind of hate elements of this and feel a little bit trapped by it. I mean, there was that old joke about, you know, the Secret Service got somebody trying to climb over the White House fence.

the security fence in the other direction. Obama told a joke at the White House Correspondence Center. He said 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.

Yeah, and you should have had enough of that, which any normal person in that situation would have to be, I thought, quite relatable. 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 semaphore 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 UFC fighter Evan Elder, who said this right after winning his fight at the ball arena in Denver. 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 2020. What a scene. Ben, do you watch the UFC? Wow.

No, I just watch what I think of as normal sports. But now they've got all these newfangled sports. But you do watch speeches from UFC CEO Dana White at the RNC. He's got that prime pre-Trump slot. Yeah, the whole, I mean, the aesthetics here are drawn from professional fighting, professional wrestling. The first night you have Donald Trump, or I guess the second night, walking down a long corridor with the camera, you know, receding behind him like a fighter entering the ring. And the last night of the convention is, right, it's going to be

like the central aesthetics and the figures are from fighting. It's

Fascinating. Are you a UFC fan? You know, Ben, it will surprise you that I am not. I'm not. But it was so controversial, I learned in some of the research for this episode, that Senator John McCain in 1996 billed it as human cockfighting. And then it led to the kind of organization being shunned and regulated and censored almost out of existence until it was resuscitated by, do you know who? I believe Ari Emanuel. Yeah.

No. Ari Emanuel 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. Gosh, is that right? I genuinely didn't know that. 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's 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, etc. So they're kind of coming up

together. Did you feel like at the time you knew about this stuff or did you miss it? No, I was watching America's Next Top Model and like I had this thing where I was like it's too good for reality TV except for the fashion ones. Like a lot of stuff that like 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.

Yeah. It was also a bit of a counterculture, right? And like, so in that way, I think a lot of people were surprised when, you know, 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. And it seemed, you know, it was a kind of a newish news story. But actually...

The shape of that relationship is really interesting because I was thinking about it. It's like this manly men being men thing that was like too aggressive, too out there, and it kind of got pushed underground for a little bit. And there's this backlash where it just actually found –

a huge amount of force, found huge audiences, and it rises back up again, you know, from the ashes with Donald Trump, who, of course, is like, has his own thing going on. He's got his locker room chat. Yeah. I think they share an appeal to this kind of broader backlash culture, this pendulum shift that people think has gone too far. Like,

And I just, yeah, I think there's something very similar in the kind of trajectories of these two worlds that struck me. It's amazing you mentioned John McCain, of course, who was Trump's great nemesis and represented the kind of last of the old traditions of the Republican Party, that he hated the UFC. And now you have this huge cultural force, right, that I think people missed in the way that parts of the media really missed Trump's appeal in the first place. And it's part, you're exactly right, it's part of the same thing.

That same shift. Yeah, I wonder if we're going to be, like, we're just all going to, you know, give us a few years. I mean, it's already a great media business, obviously, a huge business. But maybe, you know, what do you think? You think we'll be sort of like 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?

I don't know. I mean, I think it already is part, so essentially 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? Yeah. I mean, when, 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? Oh,

I think, like, it's funny. I think I became obsessed with this story not as a journalist, but as, like, a woman in the dating world. Part of my reporting comes from this, where I do think— But you had to bring your whole self to work, as they say. I had to bring my whole self to work. I started hearing it, like, 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, like, oh, wow, women—

we're in a different world where the conversations that were playing out in the political and media environments, conversations about Me Too, et cetera, were hitting home in people's lives in a real way. Like all of a sudden you had men saying, well, how can I hit on a woman?

You know, like, 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, like, strong enough for me? That's where I became kind of fascinated by this story. I don't know, Ben, if you think that's bizarre, but... No, no. I mean, I guess these currents then always are the real things that are driving media and politics. And I guess, I don't know, did you immediately see that in Donald Trump? I did.

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? That's a real deep cut, babe.net. 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. I mean, 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 like 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 like,

the world had moved too far. Yeah, it was a sense in a way that the media had gone too far, right? That like Babe.net was doing a story on what I think a lot of people saw as like a really awful date rather than as a crime. Yeah. And it felt that the media had sort of transgressed into like beyond our space, I think, that is part of what there's a backlash to. 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 there.

And then, of course, like Dana White is the person that ends up buying the UFC. He ends up getting venues with Trump, making this deal with Ari Emanuel. And, you know, UFC becomes much bigger than Endeavor. But so I think you really 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, who's CEO in 2016. Dana White endorses Donald Trump. Yeah.

and who winds up introducing him at the 2024 Republican National Convention. I mean, it really is this incredible convergence of all these different things that we've been talking about. Yeah, 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. I mean, they even played The Man's World on stage the other night. This is The Man's World!

Yeah, that was my second favorite. The best is a video they've been playing over and over, a supercut of Donald Trump dancing to YMCA. Is that manly? Is that strength? Doing the YMCA. Yeah, it's a really, it's interesting here because they are 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, you know, there's a lot of basically secular culture in

It's culture that's not about kind of traditional values that's bleeding in, sometimes bothering some Republicans, actually. 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 kind of big story behind the 2024 election. We actually got some feedback that our episode was too heteronormative to be true.

You see that? Oh, you know, I totally missed that. But I'm glad that there's still left-wing media criticism out there. But, you know, 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, you know, 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, Semaphore reporter Kadia Gobat did a fascinating story. Yeah, she's here with me in Milwaukee, and let's bring her around to talk about it.

Hi, Kadia. Thanks for being here. Hi. Thanks for having me. Kadia, it's been so long. Kadia, I love this piece. As you know, I slacked you right after. I was jealous it wasn't an audio. And so now, finally, it is. You're here. Explain when you learned that men, and particularly black men, were kind of hot for Donald Trump.

So it's been a thing since the 80s or 90s. I just feel like people kind of 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, you know, just wanted to explore that. But it never changed from the 80s. He's always been a figure in that community. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think this started right with you saying, like, I think I can get an interview with Trump. And in a way, for me, like the beginning of this story was you saying, I think I have a sort of pitch to the Trump campaign to talk to him. And it ended there.

with your saying, well, the interview was like interesting, but not that newsy. But oh my God, this was the most insane reporting experience. And I wonder if you could just like kind of walk through that a little bit. Yeah. 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 kind of was like, you know, like anything you need, we'll help you out or whatever. And I came back to Ben and Ben kind of 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, you know, understanding Donald Trump, working at Dooney & Burke.

back in the day in the early 90s. Explain what Dooney & Burke is. Dooney & Burke is a handbag store, and I used to work in their retail shop. They had one on Madison Avenue, and the other one was on the second floor of Trump Tower 57. I mean, it still exists, to be honest, but it was a high-end handbag store. A lot of tourists would come in specifically for...

you know, Trump Tower, but also, like, come into the store. This is a long time ago. Like, we used to smoke cigarettes in the back of the store at that point. But you would always see Donald Trump. That was never, like, a big deal. You would also see him in clubs if you were, you know, cute enough to get into those, like, fancy clubs with rappers. You would see him in there. It was, like, not a big deal. Which, Kadia, you were cute enough to get into those fancy clubs with rappers, obviously, I presume. Well, so you had this really interesting vantage point

to Donald Trump, not as a reporter, but as someone kind of in the orbit, a fly on the wall or like a Nora Ephron, like wallflower at the orgy kind of, is that right? Yeah. And to your point, I just never understood why people never looked at like 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 like, you know, that's my man. I can't believe he's president or he's running for president. But like, yeah,

you know, that's Donald. He's cool. So I feel like people forgot about that Donald Trump. I don't think they just forgot about it. I think there's this kind of characterization of Trump and the tabloid culture and his, you know, 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. Very much part of the fabric of the community. And on that, you know, he talks about his

op-ed during the Central Park Five time, and he talks about, you know, like, well, everyone thought they were guilty at that point, and he was kind of just, it appears he was just kind of going with the flow.

not, you know, 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 like, oh, look at you, you racist. Like, why'd you do that? So bring it back to this moment when, when Ben says you came to him and were like, oh, this, 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. Well,

Certainly, like, pay attention if you think that this group of people, you know, 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, you know, gaining black support, especially among black men, which brings me to my story because I interview a bunch of black men. Yeah. So tell the story. Like, basically, you set out to get an interview with Donald Trump. How does that work? Is that a normal process of trying to get an interview? No, not at all. So 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's, you know, let me talk to Trump about his black outreach. And the campaign kind of said, well, yeah, like 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.

And they were all New York celebrities. You know, like the first person I talked to was Daryl Strawberry, who was an iconic Met player. So that was the first person I talked to, which like Trump and Daryl Strawberry, like who puts those two together? But I set out to put those two together. You know, these are some people who weren't very political, but had this

appreciation for Donald Trump and wanted to talk about it. And so you're doing, I mean, you're getting all these kind of Trump surrogates in sports world. And this kind of 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. If I never 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.

I would think he were black the way they were treating him. Is that a common thread? Like, does this community become like strange bedfellows with Donald Trump because they have kind of common cause of a fight against institutions like the press or the criminal justice system? Yeah. So, you know, as I'm interviewing these people, I'm also going to like black conservative events and talking to just...

everyday workers or small business owners who are actually echoing this 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. No, because he's prosecuted. He's unfairly prosecuted by the criminal justice system. Because he says he's unfairly prosecuted by the criminal justice system. And yet 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. You also, you spoke to my childhood hero, former New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

He's going to speak his mind. He doesn't care how it comes out. He's not derogatory, but he is...

I like him. He's a man's man. So what is he talking about? This man's man line really stuck with me. What does that mean? Yeah, so I think, you know, in the black community, in the Hispanic community, people call it machismo or, you know, just showing strength. And that is something that kind of resonates in the black community, whether you're Lawrence Taylor and you make a lot of money or you're just...

you know, a young dude in the hood. If you have nothing, at the very least, you have, like, strength. You can, like, 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, you know...

the Democratic Party has really bolstered Black women because, you know, Democrats famously say that Black women saved the elections or, you know, voted Joe Biden in. And they feel that they have been kind of sidelined by that. I remember one man telling me, you know, 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.

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, you know, 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, like that itself has this kind of masculine quality and sales, like marketing to it, right? Yeah, it's that bravado I keep saying that appeals to the Black community. That is something I think

from that generation feel like it has been either demonized or maybe watered down when we talk about like equal rights. I can't believe I'm saying this. But yes, this is something that men, especially from that era, and, you know, our generation

are feeling and also teaching other younger men that this is probably not how it used to be and things should change. Yeah, just to kind of take this back to the media story that we're thinking about, the kind of media spectacle that you and I are here in Milwaukee kind of 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. Like, do you see these threads? Do you see this sort of case he's making about gender, about masculinity? Well, sure, right? We see that when he talks about gender in sports, right? And how a trans woman is not a woman. But also...

I mean, since the shooting, right? A lot of what's resonating on the stage right now is talking about him being our bold President Trump, you know? And he has a new mantra of fight, fight, fight. That is something, you know, some might see as a bit aggressive. Can't wait till all this backlash happens in like five years from now. But there's a lot of that. There's a lot of hyper-masculinity, I think,

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. You sort of, in a way, were set out to write a political story about his appeal and flickering in the polls to broaden his base among Black voters. Here, I mean, we've been talking about how there are UFC fighters all over the place. There's a

A lot of kind of really broad-shouldered guys showing up on that stage. And I am curious if you see, is that part of the same push or are these sort of different elements of his campaign? I do think so. I mean, didn't we just hear that Hulk Hogan is like introducing him or something? That's insane, right? Yeah, what is that about? Masculinity, you know what I mean? Like playing into that. If you think about...

Dane's telling me which J.D. Vance could get lunch bucket Democrats. What is a lunch bucket Democrats? The guy that goes to the steel mill? Like, you know, like it is romanticizing this bravado. And I think it's going to continue and just going to be very interesting. Got all the heroes of my youth here. Hulk Hogan, Lawrence Taylor.

I have to revisit my whole political sort of orientation. You're in the right place there in Milwaukee. Look at one of his spokespeople, like Stephen Chung. He's a former UFC fighter, right? It's an incredible career path. Yeah. You thought you had a weird career, Kadia. Exactly.

Probably prepares you, like working at Dooney & Burke 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 kind of nostalgia, the aesthetic fantasy of this trad wife movement, right? Some people looking for more traditional gender roles, the...

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? 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

you know, she felt like she had diminished her man so much that,

that she had to do some real introspective looks inside to regroup. And she, like, stood up in front. It was at a cigar bar, and she stood up and, like, kind of 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 kind of 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, like, equal pay and equal rights? I don't know how that happens. An 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? Sounds like a Diaz next assignment. Yeah. I mean, I think you tapped such a, such a deep vein here. Really, really interesting. And I think like it's so, I mean, it is honestly, it's so interesting to think about it. And the other amazing stat is that Trump leads particularly far among divorced men, which, you know, kind of makes complete sense. Um,

But just can you just close out here just with like a reality check? Like Trump's going to get destroyed among black voters, isn't it? 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 happening.

You know what? I am not going to make a call here. No predictions. 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. Yeah, and a marginal shift can change the election. But just to kind of keep this all in context, though, 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. Yeah.

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. Oh, God, Ben. LTs? Was it LTs? No comment. Well, thank you so much, Kadia, for being here. Thanks, Kadia. She's just great.

Yeah, and that's just incredible journalism. That was just one of the great, insane reporting projects. Just took like every possible turn. Although, you know, we didn't, I don't think we came in thinking it was particularly a story about men. And it really became that, really through the comments of these guys who have known Trump for a long time.

I think the reason this was so sort of relevant conversation is just that you look at the choices the Republican Party is making and how to present Trump. The crucial night of the convention is really surrounded by these ultra-masculine figures from the 80s, particularly, as Kadia noted, Hulk Hogan. Amazing. 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 like people who were kind of 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, you know.

More comfort coming out of the closet for Trump? Yeah, people like to be with a winner and he looks like a winner right now. That's probably the biggest factor of all. It's because he's manly. You think he looks like a winner, Ben. Because he's winning. All right, let's take a quick break and we will be back with Blind Spots with Max Tani. 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? It's definitely got a calmer atmosphere

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 the general mood here on the ground is

is giddy. There's a lot less of the kind of people singling out the media and saying, oh, these people are dishonest. You know, usually when you walk around these types of things, people will look at your badge and they'll see that you're, you know, 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 like at a Trump rally in February and other kind of recent instances, people here just feel like they're going to win. They have nothing to be angry about from the

Do you think we're going to love them back now that they love us? I mean, isn't J.D. Vance's kind of 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 kind of mythologizing them? Like, I think we've already done that to a certain degree, right? Yeah, I think there is.

There was a lot of backlash on that the first time around. But I think, you know, if you're 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. It is true that J.D. Vance's right is a media creation in a lot of ways. The publishing industry and then cable TV really just love that guy. Yeah. 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. I mean, 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. 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 talking 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. So what are some of the stories we're not seeing? What is the blind spot on the right, for example? Yeah.

Yeah, the blind spot on the right this week is strangely Kim Guilfoyle's RNC speech. Now, let me tell you why that is. So while other cable networks like CNN carried most of Guilfoyle's Wednesday address from on the RNC floor,

Mediate noted that Fox News actually cut away from the speech, uh, instead opting to interview a dog in the audience. They interviewed a dog. So basically as soon as Kim Guilfoyle, who, uh, 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, uh,

And someone interviewed some delegates and someone interviewed some delegates and the man on the street interviewed some delegates dog. And instead of cutting back after that interview to the speech, they cut instead to an interview that Sean Hannity was doing with with Eric Trump, which which was interesting. And, you know, it was a pretty unsubtle snub of Guilfoyle, who, for those who don't remember, was a host on Fox and was fired from Fox for inappropriate behavior. Oh, my God, that's right. I had forgotten.

Yeah, that's an old Fox scandal. It got like a pretty interesting and kind of 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 kind of world and have some sway in the Trump world, who are just kind of wandering around and they're bumping into some of their former bosses. Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox

Fox more recently was seen, you know, walking past Rupert Murdoch and it was kind of awkward for them. And so it's one of these really interesting situations where it's kind of a little bit uncomfortable. It's like a weird family reunion. Yes, exactly. Where there has been major divorces and scandal, etc. The Republican Party is in this sort of open and forgiving mood and trying to bring in the apostates like Nikki Haley. But Fox, it sounds like not so much.

Folks at Fox, some of them have long memories of old, you know, they're not so great at letting go of grudges, you know, for better and for worse. And also, once you leave the Fox kind of family, I think it's kind of difficult to kind of come back in. And one of the other interesting kind of dynamics, the last point I feel like I'll make about this is, this is like the best week of the year for Fox people. They, you know, every Fox personality, no matter how minor, is just completely mobbed

everywhere you walk around here, they're all walking around with security and, you know, they're just like total rock stars. It would be like if, you know, Taylor Swift or, I don't know, someone maybe moderately less famous was walking down the street. And you guys don't need security there, Ben or Max, not one of you. No, that's what it's like for us in Sun Valley. Is it? Yeah.

I've never been to Sun Valley.

current Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend, also ex of Gavin Newsom. Of course. If we can get that guy onto the ticket, that'll be a great storyline. I mean, I'm just saying part of the trend of women moving to the right, I would say Kimberly Guilfoyle right there. So tell us about the other blind spot, Max. What else are people not seeing?

Yeah, you know, 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. You know, in that case, they may have missed an interview that Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk did with Vivek Ramaswamy, a

Can we say he's a friend of the pod? Oh, for sure. For sure. Say that. Yeah. Friend of the pod. The big drama swabby. And during that interview, the quote was, you know, after the assassination attempt on Trump, if you're 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 kind of earlier, which is Donald Trump's

a deep appeal to men and the ways in which it's dominating the entire RNC, down to the smallest kind of YouTube media, conservative media host. Yeah, it's so interesting because it's sort of like, it's sort of the understory, right? It's not what political journalists spend their days writing about, even if it is what Naima Spencer Day is obsessing about. It is. I've been early to this story. Yeah, but don't you think, I mean, that kind of like deep gender story is like so present here. Yeah.

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

They're a fearless leader here. Well, 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 I was wrong about. I a few years ago when TPUSA kind of became something that was was kind of on the rise and Charlie Kirk had some money to start to kind of start the organization. It was aimed at millennial conservatives and particular millennial conservative men, which

I kind of laughed it off a little bit. I thought, you know, young people are always going to be much more liberal and, you know, they'll follow the trend and become more conservative as they as they grow up. But I think Charlie Kirk and some of these people have actually kind of proved us wrong in the sense that not only have 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. Yeah, there's a whole space that runs from like Pana Ben Shapiro to Charlie Kirk to like that Mogwarts Academy GQ wrote about recently for young men.

I feel like it's actually like in the podcasting world. I kind of at the gym will always ask like dudes the podcast they're listening to like when. So in a way this has been good for your dating life? Yeah.

No. Usually, like, you know, 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, like, really not know many of the podcasts that they're listening to and then check them out. And fascinating. I mean, 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 kind of

desire to go back to traditional gender roles. So I think the, the, the interesting thing, the other interesting thing here is the etiquette around talking to people at the gym and, and, and whether or not it's you know, you're interrupting someone's workout. Like to me, I feel, 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 on chatting. Am I interrupting their workout? You know, that's, that's, it's interesting. You feel Naima though, that

I have a no approach. Like, I would not talk to somebody at the gym unless I wanted to know, like, how much longer they're going to be on a machine. But I will say that, like, men do hit on women at the gym. That does still happen. Maybe there's something about the masculinity of that environment where, like, men will feel comfortable chatting to you in that environment. They're probably listening to podcasts just, like, that are helping them game it out.

They're like, bro, come on. Come on, girl, bro. It's time to chat to that girl. Well, you're feeling kind of pumped up. I don't know. You're feeling good about yourself maybe. Maybe just like added five pounds on the weight rack. I listen to mixed signals at the gym actually. One of the last episodes I listened to it. Our producers are losing it there. I'm going to say we're going to wrap right there. And, you know, got to hit the gym. Got to get hit on. Got to go, guys.

Thanks for listening to Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. Our show is produced by Max Tani, Allison Rogers, Sheena Ozaki, Alan Haberchak, and Andrea Lopez-Crusado. With special thanks to Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, and Jewel Zurn. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor, I feel like this week, you know, we've had a lot of men's. I'm 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, did you hear it?

It's been a bit of a flop. I did, and I watched the video. You know what? I'm entertained, but yeah, it seems like she's a bit cashed. 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 podcasts and leave us a review. If you're watching us on YouTube, please hit subscribe to our channel. And remember to subscribe to Semaphore's media newsletter, which publishes every Sunday evening.