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Recorded: 11-14-24

On this edition of Parallax Views, Tina Nguyen, author of The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out) and the resident "MAGA Whisperer" at Puck News, joins the show to discuss elements of her book, specifically the MAGA media ecosystem (ie: Tucker Carlson, amongst others), as well as the think tank she believes deserve more attention than Project 2025: the America First Policy Institute. Given that Linda McMahon, a key player at AFPI, is heading up the Trump transition team I reached out to Tina to discuss her thoughts on AFPI and how it fits into Trump's plans for his 2nd term. Tina argues that the Heritage Foundation, which drafted Project 2025, is an older institution than Trumpism with a conservative agenda that has been around for decades prior to Trumpism. AFPI, on the other hand, is a new institution and one that is grounded less in a decades-spanning conservative agenda and more in loyalty or fealty to President-elect Donald J. Trump himself. She says that while Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 figures will have a role in the Trump administration, it will be loyalists from AFPI that will be doing the management of much of the administration on behalf of Trump. All of this analysis is based on Nguyen's own contact with the MAGA world. We discuss all that and much more in the conversation on this edition of Parallax Views!