Jake Tapper: “All the Demons Are Here”

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. We are fortunate to be joined today by Jake Kaper, who, of course, is a CNN anchor, but also author of the new best selling thriller. All the demons are here. A work of historical fiction.

Although, Jake, the title. All the demons are here. Feels like it’s ripped from the headlines.

Yeah. Well, it’s ripped from Shakespeare. It’s ripped all it’s all line, kind of from the tempest, but the actual line is hell is empty and all the devils are here. And it does feel that way sometimes doesn’t it.

So this is an interesting moment to write historical fiction when Actual history is so amazing. I mean, a lot of what you’re right about is this broader metaphor about, you know, the contemporary threats facing America But before we get into all of that, I really wanna bounce a couple things off you.

Sure.

Because we’re we’re in this incredible moment here with a former president of the United States. Is standing trial, multiple venues. He faces seventy eight separate felony charges. It is completely unprecedented. He’s he’s running for president.

It seems as if he is the odds one favorite to be the Republican nominee, and and he’s running a competitive race. So We’re in this absolutely uncharted political, cultural

media moment. So as

an old school media guy, Yeah. Has anybody in the media figured out how to cover this guy? Because I

feel like Donald Trump broke

the media model back in twenty sixteen, and nobody’s figured out how to put it back together again.

I can’t authoritatively state that this person has figured out how to do it or that person has figured out how to do it. But I I can say that I think that there are some general rules that I’ve picked up along the way from covering him. One of them is we can’t act as if he is a normal regular candidate. He’s not. He’s You know, I I I I don’t think you even have to dislike him to acknowledge that he is his his own creature.

You can’t necessarily treat him the same way as you would other candidates because he says things that are often true. And of more concerning, he says things that can put other people’s lives in danger.

Mhmm.

For instance, I think one has to think about at the very least, whether or not you air his comments live. I think that that is a discussion and a debate. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. But I’m saying it is a discussion and a debate that everyone in any newsroom that has video should have because you never know what he’s going to say and the ramifications of it. I mean, he has said things before that ended up costing lives.

So that’s one. Two, I don’t think you can ignore them. That also means you can’t ignore things he says that aren’t out there. I mean

Right.

One of the reasons he is still as popular with Republicans is because this actually kinda ties in with the book, not to be book pluggy, but the book takes place in nineteen seventy seven with the character of Eich, who is, an Aewall marine, is kind of representative in ways of how skeptical and mistrustful the US public was of everything that they were hearing from the Pentagon and from the government and understandably so after Vietnam after Watergate People didn’t know what to believe about the Kennedy assassination, either one of them, or the Martin Luther King assassination. So that skepticism, that distrust that willingness to believe, conspiracy theories, etcetera. That still is in us today. And Donald Trump feeds into some of that. And, you know, he’s not always wrong about everything he says and does.

So I think that also has to be part of the equation too.

I mean, I go back and forth on all of this. There are people who say, well, you shouldn’t give oxygen to the crazy things he says, but wait. I do think he needs to be held accountable. People do need to know what he’s saying. On the other hand, let’s talk about what happened last week when he, you know, showed up in DC.

We basically had the OJ Simpson slow moving Bronco moment where you had this endless sort of blank time with, you know, showing the empty podium, showing the car and everything. Wanna read you something that my colleague JBL wrote last Friday in the Bulwark. He said the OJ Simpson case was the signal media evolution of our time, it established the template for modern broadcast news. Everything in our media world from the treatment of Monica Lewinsky to the two thousand recount to the weeks of nine eleven coverage. Trump’s two thousand sixteen campaign is directly descended from OJ.

And he goes on to say would argue the broadcast media, as much as any other factor, has driven the collapse of American political life, changed the incentive structures for both politicians and journalists, it created a sense of manic obsessiveness in the public and an active as an accelerant in our ongoing polarization. And then he goes to the wall to wall coverage of Donald Trump, you know, Donald Trump’s getting off the plane. Donald Trump’s getting in the car. So what is your reaction to that? Kinda think of you as a media throwback, and I ask this as a media throwback myself.

Yeah. What is the right balance to strike? And what did you think of the wall to wall empty podium coverage that we got again last week?

Well, it’s a complicated question because I don’t see every one of these things as the same. For instance, like showing Donald Trump flying to Washington, DC, in the motorcade, arriving for this historic, and in some ways tragic event where he was arrested and arraigned at the federal courthouse, that’s news. It’s not positive for him. It’s not celebrating him. It’s not celebratory.

It’s news. Now is that the same thing as, for instance, that time that we all got Rick rolled when he said he was going to acknowledge that Barack Obama was born in the US. Right? And that was just we were all just sitting around, and and I don’t know what MS or Fox or anyone else was doing because I was anchoring CNN or I was part of the team at CNN, but it was weird just sitting around watching an empty podium while Donald Trump was about to say something acknowledging the reality that Barack Obama was born in the US, which is not a proud moment for the media, I don’t think. Because we were being used by the campaign.

And, I mean, it’s offensive on its face when you think about the fact that this was even a matter of discussion. Right. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. I mean, like, why were we were all sitting around breathlessly waiting for him to acknowledge that he’d been perpetuating a racist lie for a decade does not speak well about us. And then there’s another example, for instance, when he was arrested and arraigned in Florida, And then he stopped and went into this Versi Cafe, this Cuban Cafe.

Mhmm. And people saying happy birthday to him and this and that. And the the value of that that question as well. So I don’t know that I agree with all of the criticism, but I certainly think that there are and ways to talk about different points of it. I myself didn’t care for the, Versa cafe coverage because I thought it was We don’t do that for anyone.

There are no campaign stops that any candidate does that we cover live, Biden DeSantis, Nikki Haley. So why were we doing it for him? I just think there need to be more discussions and debates — Yep.

—

in newsrooms before just running whatever is the latest live feed.

Yeah.

If that’s the point, right, that we shouldn’t just be running live feeds because we can. I agree with that.

Yeah. And you’ve been asked this many times before, but in retrospect, the decision to give him a live town hall meeting?

You know, I’m I’m, I’m ambivalent about it. I don’t know that that gets into the do you ignore him thing? Yeah. Are we supposed to ignore him? We supposed to pretend he’s not the leading Republican presidential candidate?

I don’t know. I mean, obviously, I’m my mind is open. I I had nothing to do with that hall. Like, I wasn’t part of it other than just covering it afterwards. But Caitlyn was fact checking him, and the crowd was Republicans and Republican leading independents in the in New Hampshire.

And Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Do you think forget the live component of it. Just forget, like, how we did it. Should Donald Trump be given a town hall? Should voters get to ask the leading Republican presidential candidate questions.

What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, I go back to your point about giving him know, live unedited time. I mean, I think you could ignore him without turning over that kind of airtime to him because he can’t be treated like any other candidate because He is going to be a fire hose of, of disinformation and Bulwark. And there’s really no way around that. But this is not to move past this too quickly, but This is what makes, I think, your book so interesting and so fun because, of course, nineteen seventy seven is a completely different world, but it’s not.

It’s not.

And it is not such a different world. And what is interesting is the way you you actually, you know, create these characters of Max Lion who is loosely based, or how do you wanna describe it loosely actually based on Rupert Murdoch?

Pretty clearly based on Rupert Murdoch. I mean, the small differences, but some of the lines he says in the book are actual quotes of Rupert Murdoch because I tried to understand what motivates Rupert Murdoch journalistically because the rise of tabloid journalism is something that happens in nineteen seventy seven And in the book, and then also, obviously, we’re dealing with it today still.

And I think this is hilarious that your Donald Trump character is evil can evil. The motorcycles stunt performer, who I will admit I had not thought about for months. I mean, basically, he is kind of a precursor, kind of this recurring American character like PT Barnes or see James, you know, with a showmanship in the spectacle, but he actually did stuff. Right? I mean, he he didn’t just sell his brand.

Evil Connevil actually did jump stuff.

He did. He wasn’t a very good jumper, but he was willing to do it. Hevel couldn’t evil for your listeners who don’t know or barely remember was a huge figure in American pop culture and even sports culture in the nineteen seventies, even though it’s questionable how athletic he actually was. Although he was in many ways, the father of a lot of the ex games and stream sports that we see today. And a lot of those people, Tony Hawk, etcetera, will credit, evil, and evil for getting them interested in kind of these dangerous one man sports.

He was a stuntman and he would do motorcycle stunts, and he would just come up with the wildest ones he could to get attention And there really wasn’t much more to it than that in his larger than life persona where he was, you know, he lived in butte, Montana, and he was kind of a shoot from the hip. Elvis type and was a fascinating character. And there exists in him the same DNA as Donald Trump. And I don’t mean it in a negative way. I don’t mean it in a pejorative way.

It’s just there is an American culture, these kind of showmen. That arise, whether it’s PT Barnum or or Evokan Eagle or Donald Trump, these people who are just able to command, they have charisma, and they have a certain charm about them, and they shoot from the hip, and they get lots of attention, and they come up with media spectacles, and the media obliges, and there is this similarity in many ways. And in fact, I don’t know anything about motorcycles at all. And motorcycles are a big part of the book. Huge part of the book.

Yeah. Because of evil, kenebel, because of a character, Ike, who’s a motorcyclist. There are a bunch of plot points that have, like, big motorcycle action scenes. So I hired this guy, Mark Gardner, who’s a writer and a motorcycle enthusiast to help me edit the motorcycle parts. He was a great guy and really helped.

You need to believe that Ike knows about motorcycles to buy the premise. Anyway, when we had done our we had finished our bit of business, he said, oh, by the way, I thought you’d find this interesting. And he sent me a link. To an essay he had written, like, two or three years ago, where he compared evil can evil to Donald Trump. And, like, I had never seen it, but It’s just there.

It’s just this DNA that’s there, and it’s just, you know, there was this silly attempt to have people can even run for president in seventy two as a joke, like as a stunt to get attention to Montana.

That’s a real thing.

That really happened. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, it it was there to play with. Well, this

is to get a little bit of background here. This is your third historical novel. I mean, the first one, the hellfire club was, was in the nineteen fifties and the McCarthy year, and and you had fictional protagonists, you know, congressman Charlie Sykes and his wife, right in the thick of the McCarthy hearings, and The next book, the Devil May Dance is set in the sixties where you had Frank sinatra and the rat pack and all of those guys and and the the whole story of, John Kennedy and Sonatra. And then this one is set in the seventies. And for some of us, it’s kind of a little bit of PTSD in the seventies was That was a screwed up decade.

And so you have Elvis, Anita, the son of Sam. Yeah. Studio fifty four. There’s, you know, cameos, you know, mentions a feral fossil at Elton John and Cher and everything. So I don’t know whether you described Max Lion, the the Rupert Murdoch character and the evil Cenevel character is.

Are they the demons?

The demons the demons are it’s more just like at the end of the book, I don’t wanna spoil it, but there’s this big confrontation where a mob is about to attack. A place where a lot of politicians have gathered, which is obviously, you know, residents of January six. Although not, it’s not direct. It’s not a direct analogy, but it is a mob frustrated with a bunch of things taking out their anger. And when I saw the tempest, last time I saw the tempest, there was a a recent adaptation, and and, you know, it it opens in in the midst of storm on an island.

And I just loved that idea, but I didn’t wanna start with the storm on an island. I wanted to end with the storm on an island. And that’s why I came up with the title. All the demons are here. And the idea of who the demons are, that’s up to the reader, are the demons, the politicians, are they the the angry mob confronting the politicians, that’s for people to decide.

You used this book to reflect on what was happening to journalism in the seventies as Rupert Murdoch was you know, getting a toll hold.

Yeah.

And really began this attack on truth, Max Lion, who is the Rupert Murdoch character. I mean, He clearly knows, you know, how to sell newspapers by playing the race card by, you know, exploiting the struggle over race and racial justice. And and you’re right about the son of Sam burgers. Just can you just set the scene for me and why you chose that moment to begin to say, this is when this began.

Well, Rupert Murdoch had gotten his toehold in American journalism when he bought a couple of San Antonio newspapers, and I was fascinated first of all, the idea of Rupert Murdoch becoming a character in this book is I have to give all the credit to Cara Swisher. I did her podcast back when I was promoting the Devil May Dance, at the end of the interview, she suggested it. And she didn’t even know that I was doing the seventies next. But I thought it was too broad who would believe that character today, but Then when I decided to do the seventies, and I picked Eveville, and evil, and then I wanted to have this plot involving Ike’s sister, Lucy, the idea that tabloid journalism was rising right in the same era too, I found fascinating, and I started watching some documentaries about Murdoch. And I read a couple of books about Murdoch.

And so first of all, he’d gotten his toehold in San Antonio, and I realized that my fear of killer bees when I was a kid is entirely his fault. Really? Yeah. The killer bees were, like, this vague threat in South America And, you know, it’s not like one of them stinging you kills you. It’s like a thousand of them stinging you kills you.

And only if I

remember worrying you about this.

You do? I remember being terrified of this.

Yeah. Oh,

that’s interesting. Completely overhyped by Murdoch in the seventies. In those San Antonio newspapers, and it, like, became a national obsession, and they made the movie the swarm. Yeah. NBC did a special.

I mean, and it was crap. Yes. They were making their way slowly to the United States, but it’s really way overhyped, the threat of killer bees. Anyway,

but it worked for Rupert Murdoch.

It worked. Yeah. And it scared me for years as a kid. Then I started reading about him and I real he says at some point, Murdoch, but then also my character, Max Lion, based on Murdoch, he articulates the idea that News consumer behavior is driven by either fear or rage. Mhmm.

That’s it. Once you know that about Merrock, You can’t unsee it. Almost everything they do is fear or rage.

That’s the secret sauce. Yeah. That’s it. That’s the formula.

Turn on Fox prime time and you’ll see fear or rage, fear or rage. Every story is one of the two. Oh, the trans community is gonna come. Oh, the Latino community is gonna come. Everything is fear or rage.

So putting Lucy into that context, Lucy is a in in my book. She is the daughter of Congress and Charlie Sykes and his wife, Margaret, who are the heroes of the first two books, and she wants to be a journalist, and she joins this new tabloid newspaper in Washington, DC called the Washington Sentinel, and goes into the world of tabloid journalism. And that was fun for me to explore because we live it not just Fox, obviously, but, like, there has been a tabloidization of all news media, period. You touched on it a second ago with, your question about OJ and how that shapes coverage with cable news and social media. And there are all sorts of imperatives here.

There are all sorts of things that are shaping us all. But it was interesting to me. And then the idea of taking this story because Lucy’s becomes a top reporter assigned to cover serial killer in Washington, DC. Because there’s a big serial killer story, a real one in New York City that is boosting Murdoch’s paper, the New York Post because of the son of Sam serial killer.

A summer of Sam.

Yeah. Then I thought, well, what what would Murdoch do if he actually had this story this serial killer and not the summer of Sam, and you really have to know the plot of the book to know what I’m talking about. But, you know, he would inject racial politics into it. Yeah.

You mean, you push the idea that their fictional serial killer in in DC was a black man. Yeah. And they play that up. It’s interesting. You were, in Philadelphia at a book event talking about and you recalled how the New York Post actually plastered a photo of two Blackmen in Boston that’s covered back in April two thousand thirteen and asked are these the Boston marathon bombers?

Yeah. I don’t know if they were black or Mhmm. Indian or I mean, they were not white. It’s all in color. Yeah.

They did that. Right? They had to pay up. That was a settlement they did way before the dominion settlement the the the new score enterprise. And I bet those two guys are thinking they should have held out for more money.

So were you writing this during or before the Dominion lawsuit? Where were before. Okay. So in many ways that you can’t read this without thinking about the dominion — Right. — lawsuit where the Fox anchors kept talking about a stolen election even though they knew it wasn’t true.

Right.

So How did that happen? Why did they do it? What did we learn about that?

Because the imperative structure is entirely ratings in money. I don’t know of any journalism awards, anyone at Fox, gets nominated for other than when Chris Wallace interviewed Putin. He did get nominated for that for an Emmy, and he deserved it, by

the way.

But he’s no longer at Fox. And at CNN, we just got nominated for forty seven

—

Mhmm.

—

Emmys, news Emmys. And, you know, we’re not gonna win them all or even most of them, probably. But that’s an honor, like,

a different business than they are,

aren’t you?

Well, that’s the thing. Yeah. We’re in an entirely different business. They don’t care. How they are regarded in the journalistic community.

They don’t care that they don’t get recognized for good journalism it’s entirely about clicks a hundred percent.

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So I’ve been thinking a lot about the nineteen seventies, which is still burned into my my my consciousness. And that you chose nineteen seventy seven, In nineteen seventy seven, there was a great deal of cynicism. There was a great deal of of doubt. And that this was just beginning. But In nineteen seventy seven, nobody really thought back then that this tabloid style of journalism was gonna pose an existential threat to American democracy.

Correct.

In nineteen seventy seven, you could look at the media and say the media is going to continue to be a guardrail. The media will stand against people like what happened during Watergate. And now you have, like, forty percent of Americans believe something that’s abjectly false. Right? I mean, even after it’s been adjudicated in courtroom after courtroom, they believe the election is stolen.

And I think you’ve made this point, you know, We’re now at the point now where we’re not sure how the American experiment is gonna turn out — Correct. — because of what you’re describing.

Yeah. No. I agree. I mean, a hundred percent. And Fox could make the decision to be part of the solution.

I guess, the lawsuits are not over.

There’s still this traumatic one,

and there are still individual people who or alleging defamation. And by the way, remember, they also had to pay some settlement to the family of Seth Rich. That poor kid that was murdered or used to work for the DNC and Hannity was involved and a whole bunch of stuff having to do with, like, pretending that he leaked the Hillary Clinton emails to the Russians, etcetera. I mean, they had to pay a huge defamation suit as far as I can tell. And and part of the deal was that it couldn’t be announced until after the twenty twenty election.

Great.

And any other newsroom,

news organization, business, or just any institution, these things would be real huge shocks. Right? I mean, they would they would be moments of, of of deep introspection. And, I mean, some heads did roll it at Fox, but

No. No. No. No. No.

No. Let me let me stop you there. The heads that rolled were the people that were telling the truth. Like except for Tucker, the the heads that rolled were, you know, they fired like Chris Starwalt and Will Saletan. And, I mean, they fired the people that had been It was reporters who were telling the truth who who got canned.

A lot of them.

A little confessional here. I had a very, very painful conversation with Paul Ryan earlier this year before a lot of this, this this went down asking, when are you going to do something as a member of the Fox board?

What did he say?

Well, you know, he he kinda threw Tucker under the bus. But when I was asking him was, you know, do you understand that you are the, you know, on the board of directors of a company that pumping this toxic sludge into the American system. And his answer was basically, and I, you know, reading between the lines is, look, I need to be in the room because it would be way worse without me. I am trying to do steer it into the right direction. I am trying to be the voice that says, we can be part of the solution.

And even though I think it’s apparent that you’re right that they haven’t made that turn, they’re still there. So the powers of rationalization must be really intense. I mean, does Fox make that much money? Is it really worth it to them to do this?

I don’t know. I mean, they’re not in it for the journalism. Right? I mean, they’re not in it to speak truth to power. They’re not in it to tell the stories.

That other people aren’t telling. I mean, I I don’t know. I know there are good journalists there. Yeah. So I don’t know.

I don’t quite understand it. I mean, they just tell so many lies and they smear so many people. It’s always punching down.

It’s always. Yeah.

I don’t get it, but I think it’s very lucrative. Those are the values that in the book Max Lion espouses because it’s succeeding. His strategy to get new readers for the Washington Sens at all is succeeding, and it’s having an influence.

Let’s go back to the book because I am absolutely fascinated by the evil can evil Donald Trump. Next is here. Eve can evil is running for president. One of the quotes that you attribute to evil can evil the candidate is our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore.

We used to have victories we don’t have them. Our enemies are getting stronger and as a country, we are getting weaker, like, straight out of Donald Trump.

Well, that might actually have been Donald Trump. That might have been from the Donald Trump announcement speech.

Okay. We’ll keep that between us. But so you see him as the quintessential American Bad Boy character. I just Yeah. You’re starting to write your third novel.

You’ve decided you’ve done the fifties. You’ve done the sixties. You can do the seventies. You wanna write about these themes of American culture and the media. Walk me through how you came up with Evogenevel because that wouldn’t have occurred to me.

I mean It

didn’t occur to me either. Okay. I’ll it’s gonna send the story’s gonna be a little named Rappy, but it is the true story. So I go fishing with Jimmy Kimmell at his fishing lodge in Idaho in two thousand twenty one, and he has purchased it and refurbished it. And he has decorated it with all evil can evil stuff.

Evil can evil, you know, famously or infamously tried to jump over the Snake River Canyon in, seventy four just a few miles away. And the charm of evil can evil completely eluded me as a kid. I was not into that. But he was a big dude. I mean, he was, you know, he was on the cover sports illustrated, who’s on the cover Rolling Stone.

He was featured prominently often on ABC wide world of sports. That was not part of my existence, but it was part of Jimmy’s. And Jimmy said, you really need to check at him out because, like, he’s this incredible character. He I I don’t think he meant it, like, for your next book. I think he just meant it like this for Shits and giggles.

You should know about this guy. And he referred me to a documentary made by a different guest at the lodge, Johnny Knoxville. And Johnny Knoxville had made this documentary called being evil, about evil and evil. And I watched it, and it was great. And then I read, a book about Abel, Kenival, and and Knoxwood told me a couple stories, just like wild stories.

Some not even in the book. I mean, some that are just having to do with, like, he was a thief and a con man before he was a a motorcycle stuntman. He was legitimately a criminal. But then he rose from that and became this other superstar celebrity. And then the more I read about him, And I just wrote something about this for USA today, off to send you the link.

He legitimately, when he was, like, twenty two when he was a poacher before he was evil, kenevo, when he was just Robert kenevo. He got pissed off because the park service in Yellowstone was killing elks. Because they had an overpopulation. And he didn’t like that because he wanted to kill elks. He was a poacher.

He would take people on hunting trips into Yellowstone. He wasn’t allowed to, but he did anyway. And he took a bunch of antlers, hitchhiked across the country, and literally got a meeting with the secretary of the interior I think it was Stuart Udall and had the rule changed. He was like twenty one or twenty two. So he did have a certain acumen And he did have a certain sense of stunts for the sake of changing policy.

So, you know, on Earth two, where evil can evil is alive today, he would have run for president. Or if, like, social media had happened earlier or don’t know. Just like a a couple things have worked out differently, it’s really not difficult to imagine him running for president and being very, very much like Donald Trump.

What’s interesting about this, it it’s historical fiction, but it also captures how our template of American politics has been completely changed. And this maybe was one of the reptilian Ron DeSantis that Donald Trump had that, that, the future of politics was not in policy wonkery or, any any of the traditional forms of working through the system. It was was about entertainment. It was about providing the masses with the Shits and giggles. It was about being larger than life and flamboyant and that there was an appeal for being the bad boy.

You remember there was a moment when you thought, well, you know, If somebody did this or did this or did this, they would be disqualified. And Donald Trump basically said, yeah. You’re gonna hold my beer. Look what I’m going to do.

Totally.

And part of his appeal, is that he is entertaining and that people don’t like him in spite of some of this bad boy stuff, but exactly because of it, don’t they?

David French had this great call that I’m sure you’ve read and I’m sure you’ve talked about about how liberal critics and others of Donald Trump miss the fact that to his fans, he is a blast. It is fun to be a part of America. It is a club that you’re in. And, yeah, the lot of it’s based on rage and fear, just like the Fox ethos, but beyond that, there’s also a lot of goofing around and making fun of people and making fun of each other. And, you know, there is something joyous about it.

Now I say that I’m not making light of any of the darker sides of it, which I think very seriously and think are very problematic, but that is something that people miss. And it is something that I tried to capture in the book because I who is also the child of Charlie and Margaret. Ike goes and teams up and works for evil can evil and sees evil can evil as a man with flaws, but also as somebody who is charismatic and it’s fun being part of his world for a while.

I have to admit that the fun escapes me a little bit with

Why don’t think it’s aimed at you and me?

No. No. It’s not. And I think, you know, that’s part of the problem. I mean, going back and I’m sort of toggling back and forth between nineteen seventy seven and now, because I think the assumption back then was If somebody told the lie and they were caught telling the lie that there’d be universal condemnation that there would be a pushback, it might even be disqualifying Now we live in an era in which people are told lies, and there’s a large portion of them that even if they know they’re being lied to, don’t seem to care.

And I think that goes back to my question about breaking the journalism model because it wasn’t that the assumption ones that If we did a fact check on somebody and prove that what you just said was not true, that there would be consequences so that the people would go, hey, thank you for telling me, the truth. And, I am outraged that I am being lied to, and that doesn’t happen anymore.

Yeah. I know.

How do we deal with that? How do we cope with that?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, one of the things that Trump did was you talked about how Trump’s effect on the media I’ve talked about this before too about how I see him as a disruptor of news media. And one of the ways he’s done that is by making facts partism. The idea that if you call out a lie, you’re being a liberal, you’re being a hack, you’re being anti trump, He has somehow sold people on this.

And Fox is right there with him. You know, they’re doing that too. They’re hand in hand with him on Oh,

you can see that the facts are partisan or the the trumpian style of projection that when he’s doing something, he will project it onto the other side, the what about ism. I mean, I think fascinating that he is openly now saying, you know, if you elect me, I am your retribution, making no secret of the fact that he would, in fact, do what he’s accusing the Biden administration falsely of doing of weaponizing the Department of Justice. He makes no secret of it. Does he? I mean, it’s right there.

You know what’s so interesting? There have been times in the last five years when I have reported on something having to do with Trump or Trump junior or an anchor at Fox or whatever, And they insisted that I was misinterpreting. I’m like, that’s not what I meant. You know what I mean? You’re taking the worst possible interpretation.

And they appealed to my sense of fairness, and they appealed to my sense of wanting to be allegiant to the facts. And I am who I am, so I listen. And I not correct the record, but, like, say, Donald Trump junior has reached out and this is what he said he meant or Sean Hannity reached out and he said he meant to be saying blah blah blah. And I’ve done that. And they afford no such opportunity for me.

No. So to me, it’s like they

under symmetric.

Well, the they understand that I try to be a person of honor and truth in fact, and they don’t care that they are not.

No. That’s interesting that that asymmetry where they will take an admission from more traditional media that, hey, we were wrong about that. Here’s a correction. Like, uh-huh, we’re jumping all over it. You will never see that kind of apology or admission on their side.

So there is that asymmetry. Part of when I was going back to my question about breaking the media model, as an old school journalist, and I started my first newspaper job in nineteen seventy six, the timing of your book, and came up through a tradition where journalists went and dug out facts and challenged power and wrote theoretically without fear or favor, Now it seems as if the model has become more about fan service.

Yeah. I agree.

People don’t like hearing negative things about people they like.

I agree. And that’s a problem. And that’s not just a Fox problem, but that is a problem. And it can’t be that way. Let’s take Hunter Biden.

As an example. Hunter Biden broke laws. I mean, we saw him break numerous drug laws on those tapes and everything. But beyond that, like, he’s tried to cash in on his family’s name and put his father in a horrible position and His father does seem to have a blind spot about it. And the whole thing about not acknowledging his daughter with that woman in Arkansas is just heartbreaking for that girl.

And that whole story, the whole Hunter Biden saga is really awful. And yet on the left, If you even cover it or talk about it or discuss it, then they don’t wanna hear it because it’s saying something unpleasant about a side that they root for. Fan service is not a good way to do journalism.

No one. I think that’s become sort of internalized, and then the part of a lot of folks who believe that the job of the media is to confirm their priors, tell them what they already believe what they want to hate the right people and to praise the right people. And let me just ask you one last question because I I know that a lot of people are probably wondering this. You know, with your heavy broadcast schedule, how the hell do you write novels? So

The first answer is, obviously, I’m wired a little differently, and I don’t mean that it’s it’s probably not a good thing, but, like, I don’t relax. Very easily. And, like, I come home and I write. And I just I am very driven. And so that’s part of it.

The other part of it is when I write a book, I spend a lot of time researching, I spend a lot of time outlining, and then I break it up into chapters, and then I have assignments for myself. Okay. In this chapter, these five things need to happen. And then I try to write for at least fifteen minutes a day every day when I’m in the middle of a writing project because even if I’m busy, everybody has fifteen minutes a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.

And if that’s all you do that week, that’s still an hour forty five. That’s two pages maybe. And That’s the lesson is I wrote a novel in my twenties. Mhmm. It didn’t get published.

And then I put it down. And then I didn’t try to do fiction again for another, like, twenty years. And if you don’t sit down and write, then that will happen to you too. Twenty years will go by and you haven’t written a word of fiction, or you’ve written a word, but you know, you never finished anything. And it can happen like that unless you have the the schedule and make yourself abide by it.

Are you already thinking about your, next novel and

I am. Thinking about my next novel. I’m also thinking about, like, a couple non fiction projects I wanna do. So I need to talk to the publisher and figure out what they want me to do. But I’m not just thinking about them.

I’ve worked on the non fiction project, and I’ve worked on a next book book four.

Well, the good news is at least you have something else in your life because you got a new dog today. Right? We got Moose. Congratulations.

We lost our, Australian Terry or Winston, who some of your, listeners might have seen on Twitter Winston Tapper. He was twelve. We lost him a few weeks ago. So We got Moose today. Bernadoodle.

He’s a big goofy guy. We’re gonna have to set up a Twitter account for him too.

And I

think that will be therapeutic. The new book all the demons are here Jake Kapper is, of course, a CNN anchor. His earlier books include the outpost and untold story of American valor, the Hell Fire Club, and the Devil May Dan. Jake, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Such a pleasure, Charlie. Thank you.

And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again. Secret Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper.

And engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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The jets are bracing themselves into doing hard knocks this year.

Inbracing themselves. Look, I call just wanna control the controllables. They don’t want to have a camera crew in the building. You know, I know that they wanna lie low. This is what happens when you go and swing for the fences and get out of Rogers.

Are you kidding me?

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