Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair

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.

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. 

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. 

On this week’s “Inside the Hive,” co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan discuss the four-day extravaganza of Democratic hopes and dreams and the official coming out of Joe Biden as the nominee who will face off against Donald Trump for the future of the free world. From Joe and Jill Biden’s 70s sitcom-worthy biography to Barack Obama’s cold dismantling of Trump to Kamala Harris’s intersectional feminist vision, Fox and Hagan examine the spectacle and speeches (and the musical choices) for clues to the deeper storylines and the political battles ahead. With Republicans rolling out their own program next week, our co-hosts are poised somewhere between hope and nausea. 

On this episode of Inside the Hive, the co-hosts of Showtime’s The Circus, which premiers its fifth season this weekend, stop by to talk about how quote-on-quote traditional campaigns may be extinct; how Joe Biden will handle a more progressive Democratic party; and the intricacies of filming their show during a global pandemic. 

On this week’s “Inside the Hive," author and journalist Kurt Andersen discusses his new book, “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History,” which is both the story of how the GOP spent the last 50 years reengineering the economy to favor big business at the expense of the working class, and also a crucial primer for the 2020 election. Andersen argues that we’re at a crossroads not unlike 1980, when Reagan ushered in the rightward tilt of our economic lives, selling the idea that unfettered greed would magically lift all boats. The plan was long in the making, a counterstrike against the 1960s, and it was all too successful. To understand what must be done in a post-Trump America — which is the only America with a future — you have to understand the crucial history that brought us here. 

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Nick Bilton comes back to talk with Emily Jane Fox about Congress’s tech mess, Trump’s tweeting, and the loss of our beloved editor, John Homans.

On this week’s Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan go deep into everything you need to know about the governments “retaliation” against Michael Cohen, Trump’s mental acuity test, and the major roadblocks standing in the way of his re-election.

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GOP consultant and Never-Trumper John Weaver talks to “Inside the Hive” about the origins and aims of the Lincoln Project, the PAC that’s kicking out incendiary viral ads aimed at exploiting Trump’s self-regard and paranoia and keeping him on the defensive. Weaver analyzes the Biden campaign and argues that a relentless barrage of negative advertising will weaken Trump and help “clear the air” for Biden’s positive message. He also implores nervous Democrats to stop fretting and follow their lead: “They’re more worried about losing than winning,” Weaver says of Democrats. “Stop worrying about November and beat the shit out of him now.” Also listen in for the exclusive premiere trailer to the new HBO movie, The Swamp.

On this week's episode of *Inside the Hive*, Emily Jane Fox talks with Randi Weingarten of American Federation of Teachers about the biggest question on everyone's mind: will schools safely open in September? They discuss what needs to be done to protect teachers, whether it makes sense to pay for remote college this fall, and how the Trump administration dropped the ball.

This week on Inside the Hive, CNN’s Jake Tapper joins Joe Hagan for a wide-ranging conversation, from his role covering Trump to the gripping new war movie “The Outpost," based on Tapper’s 2012 nonfiction book about a harrowing battle between 53 U.S. forces and 400+ Taliban in which eight Americans were killed. Tapper talks of his emotional reaction to reports that Trump ignored intelligence about Russia paying Taliban insurgents to kill U.S. soldiers. Tapper also addresses the theory that CNN itself is partially culpable for Trump's rise and explains what motivates his reporting in a world where Watergate-sized revelations rarely move the needle of public opinion. 

On this week's Inside the Hive, Nick Bilton comes back to talk about social media during COVID19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, how Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered in the history books, and why we shouldn't trust the newest polls. Plus, Bilton reveals his matchmaking abilities.

As President Donald Trump stares down a global pandemic, an economic catastrophe, protests following George Floyd's murder, and John Bolton and Mary Trump's books, the general election hangs in the balance. Former Trump advisor Sam Nunberg joins this week's *Inside the Hive* to talk about what the campaign is getting wrong, the last time Trump called him, whether the president even wants to be reelected, and who's on his list of enemies.

On this week’s Inside the Hive, cohost Joe Hagan talks to two lawyers on the front lines of the battle over the integrity of November's election. It’s a worrisome picture. Marc Elias, a veteran lawyer for the DNC, and Dale Ho of the ACLU, discuss their respective court battles to establish and protect mail-in voting and expand the rights of voters in the face of well-funded GOP efforts to limit and even purge voters, especially African-American and younger voters. Will Republicans follow Trump’s lead and restrict mail-in voting in crucial swing states as COVID-19 surges and depresses turnout? And what about the suspicious new postmaster general appointed by Trump? Joe Biden’s fear that Trump will steal the election is the daily nightmare of lawyers Elias and Ho. If Trump should challenge the results by zeroing in on mail-in votes, says Ho, “we’re really in uncharted territory.”