Inside the Hive

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan ask the question: If this reality-TV presidency was scripted, how might it end? Expanding on a special project published in the Hive this week—in which Susan Orlean, Tom Perrotta, Anthony Scaramucci, Alexandra Petri and others imagine a Trump-era “finale”—the hosts bring in special guest Lee Eisenberg, former head writer of The Office (and Hive-famous financée to Fox), to discuss how a writer’s room in Hollywood might build a bookend to the series—or, as the case may be, a cliffhanger to another season of Trumpian hell. In the spirit of both hope and realism, the hosts offer advice for surviving the next week and begin (carefully) imagining post-election possibilities for a nation desperate to wean itself from Trump’s show-and-awe dopamine hits. 

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This week, Hive special correspondent Gabe Sherman, who has covered Donald Trump since 2015, joins cohost Joe Hagan for an in-depth discussion of the final days of the 2020 election and - possibly - the Trump era. Sherman and Hagan look past the polls to discern the narrative logic of Trump’s reality-TV presidency: As he runs out of storylines and ideas, the President of “scandal, chaos and conflict" has been bested by his biggest political competitor of the 2020 campaign: the coronavirus. Desperate to distract the public from the reality of mass death and joblessness, Trump has failed to live up to his own entertainment credo: “He’s become boring,” says Sherman. Carefully peeking past November 3rd, the two Hive reporters consider what comes next for Trump, for the media, and, more importantly, for an exhausted nation — is it possible to return to political normalcy, even under Joe Biden?  

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With less than three weeks to go before the election, Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett joins co-host Emily Jane Fox to talk about the closing arguments each candidate is making—or not making, as it may be. Plus, he weighs in on the bigger questions of how Washington could normalize in a post-Trump world and what we should be doing in this final countdown. 

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With President Donald Trump as contagion in chief and the election right around the corner, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox break down the administration's trust deficit, the debate over the next presidential debate, and the personal bellwethers they've seen over the last few weeks.

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On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-host Emily Jane Fox sits down with former Obama White House advisor Valerie Jarrett to discuss what it’s like to work with Joe Biden, how debate prep usually works, what’s at stake in the coming weeks, and what a difference mentorship can make. 

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With a Supreme Court nomination fight, a debate slugfest, and a battle for the soul of our nation on the horizon, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk about what’s at stake for the winners and losers and how to make it through alive.

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This week, “Inside the Hive” welcomes historian Peter Fritzsche, author of "Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich,” to help separate fact from exaggeration on the increasingly pressing question of how much Trump’s GOP resembles the Nazis of the early 1930s. As Donald Trump attacks democratic norms and undermines the electoral process, and AG William Barr stokes fear of "a socialist path” if Trump loses, historians are hearing distressing echoes of Adolph Hitler’s rise, from the fear-mongering demonization of the left to the threat of street violence and military force against enemies real and imagined. One difference: “A white ethnic America is much more important in Trumps’ campaign than the vision of a Aryan-ized Germany was in Hitler’s electoral campaigns,” says Fritzsche, who says the MAGA conception of America "means there are villains who have undone America but now there are the virtuous who can remake America and 'make it great again.’ I call it ‘muscular melodramatic populism'”—the same phenomenon that brought Hitler to power. 

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On this week’s Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox go deep into Bob Woodward's new bombshell of a book, which is all the more rattling because it is backed up by tapes of President Donald Trump himself detailing failure of leadership in the face of a global pandemic. Along with two other missives, from Michael Cohen and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the president and his family have been caught in a tattered web of their own words at a time when they needed to be weaving their own narratives if they want to have a chance in November. The question is whether or not book sales will translate into votes, and if any of this will hold until then.

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On this week’s “Inside the Hive,” Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan assess the state of the presidential race at the end of the long, hot 2020 summer and find themselves torn between glimmers of hope for Joe Biden in the polls and the ongoing apocalyptic tidings of Trumpism. In a feature interview, Hagan talks to longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, whose best-selling book “It Was All a Lie” is a confession, a mea culpa and a searing analysis of the racism and xenophobia that has swallowed the GOP with the rise of Donald Trump, who he deems a “traitor” to his country. "I really think he is against America, what it means to be an American,” he says, blaming the Republican Party for "a complete collapse of responsibility that they had to defend democracy in America. And they failed." Stevens also offers advice on how to talk to your Trump-loving relatives about their vote in November. 

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On this week’s “Inside the Hive,” Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan parse Trump's ghastly RNC, discussing what the Trump children’s speeches tell us about the family’s inner workings and the psyche of their narcissistic paterfamilias. As the GOP tries to turn the social unrest in Wisconsin into a suburban fear factor and tie it to Joe Biden, our hosts wonder whether this week’s convention—or the DNC, for that matter—will have any lasting impact. Plus: Joe Hagan talks to author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates about his role guest editing the September issue of Vanity Fair, which focuses on the Black Lives Matter movement and the fallout from the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Arriving in print and online during the Repulican National Convention, the issue aims directly at the heart of what’s at stake in this year’s election. 

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