Zack Beauchamp

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference? Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz published a piece that he reported in Hungary, about how life in a modern authoritarian regime doesn’t look and feel like you might expect: “You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if — still go on feeling as if — the big one is not yet here,” he writes. So I invited both Beauchamp and Marantz on the show to debate these big questions: What timeline are we on? What signs are they looking at? If we’ve crossed the line into authoritarianism, how would we know? Is Trump losing? Or is it possible he’s already won? This episode contains strong language.

A strange new gender politics is roiling the 2024 election. At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump made his nomination a show of campy masculinity, with Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, warming up the crowd. JD Vance’s first viral moments have been comments he made in 2021 about “childless cat ladies” running the Democratic Party and a “thought experiment” assigning extra votes to parents because they have more of an “investment in the future of this country.” Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is centering her campaign on abortion rights, and Tim Walz has been playing up his own classically masculine profile — as a former football coach, hunter and Midwestern dad.  What are the two sides here really saying about gender and family? And what are the new fault lines of our modern-day gender wars? Christine Emba is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.” Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox and the author of the new book “The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.” In this conversation, we discuss some influences on JD Vance’s ideas about gender and family, the tensions between those ideas and the beliefs about gender represented by Donald Trump, the competing visions of masculinity presented by the two parties in this election, how Dobbs changed Democrats’ message on gender and family, and more.

“Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible.” So writes Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox. Almost a month has passed since Hamas fighters slaughtered over 1,400 people in Israel and the state mounted its furious response. For weeks, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, cutting off water and electricity to the tiny strip of land and carrying out airstrikes that have reportedly killed over 8,000 Palestinians. On Friday a ground invasion began, and the response across much of the globe has been horror. If Israel continues down this road, the cost in Palestinian lives, and in support for Israel, will be immense. The question that hangs over the criticism is this: What, then, should Israel do? What would be a moral response to Hamas’s savagery and to the very real need Israelis have for security? Beauchamp, who has covered Israel extensively in recent years, set out to answer that question. He spoke with counterterrorism experts, military historians, experts on Hamas, ethicists and more. I found his piece “What Israel Should Do Now” one of the best I’ve read since Oct. 7. So I asked him to join me on the show.