Second Annual* IMBW Mailbag! (answers)

Trump, Biden, John Oliver, Archduke Ferdinand

Could you summarize your biography and/or résumé? I didn't expect the writer of this blog to know something about economics, you also mentioned working for the government at some point, and said you were doing stand-up comedy back in the Bush era. I'm curious to know how it all fits together.

Ah — the “who the hell are you?” question. It’s a fair one, because a Substack writer could be an acclaimed author writing under a pseudonym (unlikely), a Russian cyberterrorist scanning for marks (probable), or even an AI program that will soon end five thousand years of humans communicating through writing (coming in six months).

I studied political science and economics at Georgetown. Annoyingly, I am only an econ minor because — though I did enough coursework for a major — I was a transfer student, and not all of my credits transferred. If you’re wondering where I accrued those non-transferred credits, the answer is: The Evergreen State College. And yes, I will write about that experience at some point!

I did my MA at the University of Chicago; I am one of those Evergreen-to-U-Chicago people that you run into all the time. My masters is in International Relations with a concentration in development economics (basically World Bank-type stuff). That’s why I frequently write about economics but just-as-frequently point out that I’m an economish, not an economist.

I did a brief stint in the Peace Corps in Morocco, which is another experience that I’ll write about at some point. I came back to DC in 2005 and got a low-level job at the Environmental Protection Agency, which soon became a speechwriting gig. Around that time, I started doing standup comedy. People sometimes ask: Did your bosses at EPA know about the standup, and were they supportive? The answers are “yes” and “yes”! I basically got reverse-heckled; I was a mediocre enough speechwriter that my bosses more-or-less told me: “Keep your night job”.

In 2011, I did a gig at the DC Improv opening for shaggy-haired and egregiously British Daily Show correspondent named John Oliver. He (and a Daily Show producer named Rory Albanese) asked for my e-mail, and that led to me getting hired when John started Last Week Tonight in early 2014. I left LWT in 2020, had a typically-chaotic pandemic period, and here I am.

Is there a story behind why you left John Oliver? One you can say out loud without NDAs or burning bridges?

See above: No matter what, John will always be the guy who saw me in a comedy club and plucked me from obscurity. So, I’m eternally grateful for that. And he and I split up, but I should learn from the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial and not air the details of that breakup. Who shat in whose bed and which finger was severed by whom and for what reason is best left unsaid.

Any reader of this blog can figure out that I have mixed feelings about my time at LWT. We did some stuff that I’m proud of, and we did some stuff that I’m not-so-proud of. I write about late night TV sometimes because: 1) The field has undergone a profound shift that I’m well-positioned to write about; 2) Political comedy shows are part of the media ecosystem and now frequently produce what I consider to be intellectually-dishonest content redolent of Fox News; and 3) I’m a cranky 40-something bastard who feels that my genre was overrun by hacks.

And regarding thing #2 and thing #3…

I have been searching high and low for your reaction to the John Oliver piece, so now I’m going to have to ask: What did you think? Was it equally as vapid as the Stewart episode? How does an episode like that get made, when just at that moment places like the New York Times are finally starting to treat Trans activists claims with even a tiny bit of skepticism?

I thought the LWT piece was not as vapid as the Stewart piece, but that’s like calling something “not as French as Cirque de Soleil”. I felt that the LWT piece was dishonest and reductive; they misrepresented the science and failed to engage the issue in any real way. Jesse Singal broke down the misrepresentations of the research, and Jonathan Chait mentioned Stewart and Oliver while calling out activist tactic of pretending that the only qualms about youth gender medicine come from far-right conservatives. I hope that nobody who watches political comedy shows these days thinks that they’re getting a clear-eyed, intellectually rigorous breakdown of an issue.

How does a piece like that get made? God, the “how” there is gigantic — a full explanation of “how” would probably go back to the Big Bang. Instead of making a futile attempt to trace the “how”, I’ll reiterate a point that I’ve made before: Many people in the “news” business are actually in the narrative business. They tell us stories that reinforce what we already believe, with counterarguments and inconvenient facts conveniently omitted. Caveat emptor.

Why is the name "Archduke Ferdinand" a harbinger of doom in any century? The guy who died in Sarajevo was not the first, in fact there were TWO of them during the Thirty Years' War, and arguably that conflict was worse in some ways. Why?

It’s true: Any time and place where there has been an Archduke Ferdinand has been beset by tremendous death and suffering. But that seems like less of a coincidence when you consider that basically all of human history has been beset by tremendous death and suffering. The concept of even moderate death and suffering has existed for perhaps about 70 years, and only in a few parts of the world. So — at the risk of taking Archduke Ferdinand’s side — I don’t think he’s to blame.

Which Supreme Court justice would win in no-holds-barred 9-way cage fight?

Easy: Kavanaugh. We saw during his confirmation hearing that he has reservoirs of rage he can draw on that allow him to undergo a Hulk-like transformation.

Is Trump's political career REALLY dead, as many in the MSM seem to believe, and more importantly, does it really matter anymore, if the political forces he has unleashed continue beyond him?

Is Trump’s political career dead? No. Death is notable for its finality, so anything that’s still possible is not dead. Trump could still be president, just as he could still be an astronaut, a Mouseketeer, or the cover girl on Maxim magazine’s Hot 100.

However, I would say that the probability of Trump being president again is approaching the probability of him being an astronaut (and the physics of launching his fat ass into space boggle the mind). I wrote in March that I thought Trump’s re-election chances were plummeting, and I’m more confident in that prediction than I was at the time. Strangely, that feeling has less to do with Trump’s multi-faceted legal challenges or his poor endorsement record in the midterms; I think people are just sick of the guy.

My TV instincts are influencing me more than my political instincts here. Every sitcom — no matter how popular — eventually runs out of steam. Jokes get played out, plots run thin; the audience moves on. The shows on this ranker list of the top ten sitcoms of all time — excluding The Simpsons, which should have ended 20 years ago — ran for an average of 9.33 years. The Trump Show has jumped the shark, and I can’t see it getting renewed through 2029.

Does it matter? Yes, I think it matters a lot. I have major concerns with the overall direction of the Republican Party, which I feel has been getting nuttier, less committed to democracy, and less capable of governing for my entire adult life. And yet, Trump is still an outlier. The political environment on the right is bad enough that a deeply-ignorant, racist, aspiring authoritarian narcissist could gain power, and yet we remain slightly unlucky that he actually did. The GOP could solve their “candidate quality” problem by returning to Earth, and maybe one day they will. In the meantime, I remain hopeful that Republican primary voters will end this hellish era and nominate a candidate who sucks in a conventional way.

(a) Do you think Biden should run again in 2024. (b) With Kamala Harris?

(a) No, which pretty much answers (b).

I like Biden. I think he’s done well on the big issues, i.e. Ukraine, inflation, climate change, and returning to normalcy after Covid. His pandering to the nutty left makes me roll my eyes sometimes, but it’s mostly been limited to rhetoric. And, of course, job A-1 was just to beat Trump, and he did that. Honestly, if he had won the election and then spent his term getting high and playing God of War: Ragnarok, I would still consider my vote well-cast.

But he’s just too old. And yes, age is only a number, but in Biden’s case it’s quite a large number, and he has obviously lost a step. I don’t feel good about the prospects of him being fit to serve six years from now.

When Trump was president, I thought a lot about competence. I felt that presidents face many decisions that don’t have pre-fabricated answers, so they need to be knowledgeable and mentally nimble. I do not consider Trump to be knowledgeable or mentally nimble (hot take!). Trump is as mentally fit as he is physically fit, and he is basically a 250 pound lump of cholesterol held together by a belt.

If I believe that mental fitness matters, then I believe that mental fitness matters. And that’s why I hope that Biden serves out his term and then calls it a career. If Biden decides to Cincinnatus himself, I think that’s a great story: A grizzled veteran gets coaxed out of semi-retirement during a time of crisis. The country needs him to do one big thing, he does it., and then he rides an Amtrak train off into the sunset. I think that’s an outstanding narrative; that’s basically Public Servant: The Movie. I hope Biden decides to live that script instead of fucking things up in the final act.