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Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, November 3rd. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that says no to President Donald Trump on 60 Minutes on Sunday. 

[clip of Norah O’Donnell] Zohran Mandami, 34-year-old democratic socialist. He’s the frontrunner. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Communist. Not a socialist. Communist. He’s far–

[clip of Norah O’Donnell] Some– 

[clip of President Donald Trump] –he’s far worse than a socialist. 

[clip of Norah O’Donnell] Some people have compared him to a left-wing version of you. Charismatic, breaking the old rules. What do you think about that? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Well, I think I’m a much better looking person than him, right? 

Jane Coaston: No. No. Let’s speak honestly on this podcast. No. [music break] On today’s show, President Trump plans to host a Syrian president at the White House for the first time in history, presumably inside the half that still exists. And the government shutdown is only days away from becoming the longest of all time. But let’s start with the Republican Party and its future. Last week, former Fox News host and conservative pundit Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes onto his highly ranked podcast for a friendly conversation about Israel and conservatism. In case you don’t know who Nick Fuentes is. He is a white supremacist anti-Semite. He attended the 2017 Unite the Right white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and was present at the January 6th riot in Washington. Remember that your body, my choice meme from right after the election? Yeah, that was him. And he has garnered more and more power on the American right over the last few years. But in order to really understand who he is, I think you need to hear him speak for himself. I spoke to him back in 2019. When he so gently explained to me that his objection to interracial marriage, which he once said was akin to a person having sex with a dog, was just about incompatibility between races. Here he is speaking about how Jewish people and non-Christians will need to be murdered en masse when he and his followers take power, during a live stream in December of 2023. So if you don’t want to hear that, skip about 30 seconds. 

[clip of Nick Fuentes] There is an occult element at the high levels of society and specifically among the Jews. So many of the people that are perpetrating the lies and the destruction on the country, they are evildoers. They are people that worship false gods. They are people that practice magic or rituals or whatever. And more than anything, those people need to be, when we take power, they need to be given the death penalty. Straight up. 

Jane Coaston: And in case you’re wondering if he’s changed his views, Fuentes told Carlson last week that the main obstacle to limiting corporate power in America was, quote, “organized [?].” Carlson’s podcast with Fuentes has garnered millions of views and highlighted a dangerous schism on the American right. Because while many conservatives condemned Fuentes for his racism and anti-Semitism and Carlson for basically giving him a nice back rub for two hours, others seemed to find it necessary to defend Carlson. They included Kevin Roberts, president of the powerful right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025. In a video posted on Thursday, Roberts described criticisms of Carlson as examples of so-called cancel culture and added, quote, “the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” Heritage has since clarified that actually the organization does not support some of Fuentes’ views, like his goal of, quote, “total Aryan victory,” or that, quote, “Black people should be in prison for the most part.” But it’s clear to me that the conservative movement is absolutely terrified of running afoul of the purity test determined by a former Fox News talk show host and an extremely racist streamer. So to talk more about Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the rift within the right, I spoke to Robert Draper. He is a New York Times journalist focused on the politics of the right wing. Robert, welcome to What a Day. 

Robert Draper: Thank you for having me on, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: I covered the far right and the white nationalist movement for a long time, and I spoke to Nick Fuentes back during Trump’s first term. Can you give our listeners some background on who he is, what he believes, and where did he come from? 

Robert Draper: Sure, Nick Fuentes is a 26-year-old white nationalist who comes from the suburbs of Chicago. He emerged on the scene in 2017 around the time of the Unite the Right rally. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Robert Draper: In Charlottesville. And he was just you know an 18-year old kid at the time, but was and he is a fairly erudite young fellow. 

Jane Coaston: And very good at garnering media attention. I remember–

Robert Draper: Very! 

Jane Coaston: He was at Boston University at the time and he claimed that he had to leave because of all the backlash about him going to a basically a white nationalist rally, but it was interesting how even then he was very good at garnering the spotlight. 

Robert Draper: Yes. I mean, for one thing, he has a taste for the outrageous. I mean I think he believes outrageous things, but he knows how to express them in a way that sort of, you know, cut through the noise. And he speaks in full paragraphs. He’s a fluent guy. He looks like a sort of innocuous young white fellow. And so he was camera ready for shows like Good Morning America and things like that. But he quickly distinguished himself from a lot of other people on the right by is outright racism, frankly, not just saying the quiet part out loud, but expressing it in the most virulent way. And also, I should say, to say that he’s sexist is um kind of an understatement. I mean, he’s the founder of a group that calls themselves Groypers. That’s from an internet meme that’s derived from Pepe the Frog. And they’re, by and large, disaffected, young, male, mostly white, conservatives, many of them incels, meaning involuntary celibate. And Fuentes himself has had no girlfriends that we know of. But he’d been kind of, you know, Jane, as you’re indicating, a sort of marginal figure for for years. That began to change just really in the last few months. And I learned of it by speaking to figures on the right who are expressing worry, saying that this guy won’t go away. It’s not just that he won’t away. He’s actually gaining locomotion. He’s gaining more followers. And in particular, that came to be the case when he had this sort of back and forth online with Tucker Carlson and was seemed to have gotten the better of it. 

Jane Coaston: He was at the January 6th insurrection. And I think that there was a sense for a lot of people that that was kind of the limit of his fame. And then he had dinner with then former, now current President Donald Trump, which it was very unclear how that took place. Trump always denied that he knew who he was, but between 2021 and that back and forth with Tucker Carlson. What was he doing? 

Robert Draper: Yeah, I mean, he was doing the same thing as always. For one thing, Jane, he was um getting de-platformed left and right. It isn’t just that he was taken off of Twitter, he was taken off of Facebook, taken off of YouTube. I think Rumble um after a while decided not to platform him. And so he was sort of, you know, staying one step ahead of the law as it were, kind of moving from one rogue streaming outfit to another. And it’s you know exactly how he was keeping himself afloat financially, was never clear. It’s still not frankly clear. But I do think that during that period of 2021 to 2023, the far-right messages were more dominated by people like the aforementioned Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and the like. Fuentes was relegated more or less to a corner. However, uh he came to be associated with Kanye West when West was having his brief run for the presidency, and it was in that window of time that Kanye was invited to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with Trump. So he brought along Fuentes, along with a few others. Nothing emerged from that in terms of him gaining greater influence, but it did put him back on the map. And then early this year, Elon Musk deferred to the wishes of other conservative influencers and restored his Twitter account. Right now, he’s got over one million followers on Twitter. Hard to know how many of those are bots, how many of these are algorithmically generated, um the same with his show. But what is clear is that all of these have gone way, way up over the last year. And it’s clear as well that other influencers like Candace Owens, like Tucker Carlson, who basically did their level best to ignore Fuentes have stopped ignoring him. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I want to get to the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, which has garnered so much attention and so much concern within the right. How did that interview come about? What shifted on both sides? Because Carlson once called Fuentes a, quote, “weird little gay kid,” and then was having this really softball interview with Fuentes. What made Fuentes someone, quote unquote, “worthy” of so much attention?

Robert Draper: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s been the question lots of people have asked. And when I did my story about Fuentes in the New York Times, I got a lot of even preemptive pushback from people on the right who were saying, please don’t give him what he so craves, attention. But, but Carlson had been curious about Fuentes for a while. He knew that Fuentes was, um, talented not only just in terms of his overall fluency, but at the art of attention seeking. And when it became clear to Carlson that, uh, his attempt to be dismissive of Fuentes, just calling him some gay kid living in his parent’s basement not only hadn’t succeeded in sort of grinding him into sawdust, but instead had only brought more attention to Fuentes. Then Carlson decided to reach out to him, which he did. I’ve been in touch with both Fuentes and Carlson, you know, since all of this. And the other thing too, Jane, is that what they have in common is the same enemies, which is that people who are pro-Israel. Particularly, say,um  influential pro-Israeli donors. Um. They have widely condemned uh Carlson, and they have been, of course, condemning Fuentes for years. And so Carlson began to, you know, see a kind of um possibility of common cause here. And when you listen to the interview, as you clearly have, what was taking place were two guys who have the same enemies and who were commiserating in a sense. And I think there’s a lot of this going on in the right where there is a tendency to seek solace with other people on the right just by virtue of the fact that they have the same enemies. The left has a lot problems on its own, but I don’t think that’s one of them. 

Jane Coaston: One of the reasons I think it’s important to talk about this is that it’s not just that Tucker Carlson gets millions of clicks on his podcast and he’s like such a major presence within TPUSA and these right-wing groups, he has a lot of support from Vice President J.D. Vance. When J.D. Vance hosted Charlie Kirk’s show after his assassination, his first guest was Tucker Carlson. And especially if you’re looking ahead to 2028, you have someone who would be running, you have someone who has so much political power who is listening to these voices who does not want to condemn, you know, racist kids who are part of this movement. This is a vice president who is very much aligned seemingly with these people, with Carlson, for example. 

Robert Draper: Correct. Yeah, no, that’s right. Um. Tucker commands such influence, you know, historically into this day with the right, even despite the fact that he’s broken from Trump and made his life difficult on some things. But it’s really interesting to see how um Vance has not proactively uh taken any opportunity to condemn Fuentes, someone who your listeners need to know, absolutely despises J.D. Vance. I mean, Fuentes to me had just said that he’s far worse than Trump, far worse than like than like Gavin Newsom. I mean Fuentes at one point said to me, I’ll tell all my people to vote for Gavin Newsome before they vote for a shape-shifter who was made in a Peter Thiel laboratory like J.D. is. 

Jane Coaston: And also, it should be referenced, uh part of his objection is that he has a non-white wife and non-white children. 

Robert Draper: That’s right. And of course, Fuentes um uh has been not the least bit shy about pointing that out. And so that that Vance has held his tongue on that, tells you everything about um the great concerns that the right has, including the favorite right now, um to be the Republican nominee, to tend to um the young male vote that really helped bring Trump across the finish line in a couple of states. They’re going to need those voters. And if you condemn Nick Fuentes and you turn off those voters, you perhaps turn off other people who have their own objections to Israel and may certainly not regard themselves as racist but but think that Vance has gone too far. There’s a lot of ginger footwork, in other words. 

Jane Coaston: I was going to ask you a question about you know kind of how anti-Semitism differs on the right and on the left. But I think that this is a broader question actually, which is what do you think that this fight means more broadly for our politics going forward? Because you would think that for the American right, you know they have the White House, they have, you know, rock rib support for Donald Trump. They have control of Congress. But it seems like this is a debate that is not going to go away, where you have one side saying we need to confront this, these deeply racist elements of the American right. And you have another side saying like, no, we need keep them because nothing is worse than the left. Where do you think this goes? 

Robert Draper: Look, on the one hand, Jane, I mean, it’s healthy for both parties to be having open disagreements about foreign policy, you know, aboutt um military aid to Israel, about Gaza, that Republicans are engaging in that discussion is up to a point, I think very healthy, long overdue even. However, like, involves all this needle-threading regarding, you know, trying to condemn Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli government writ large for its prosecution of Gaza, while at the same time trying not to appear anti-semitic, but coddling someone like Fuentes in the meantime, I think this is a dynamic that we’ll see a lot of. You know as for the broader question of anti-Semitism in both parties, it’s real and it exists and it’s to be condemned wherever it’s spotted. Also there has to be space I think for healthy debate about the future of Gaza, whether America’s support for Israel should have more fetters than it currently does. It’d be nice if that took place without the anti-Semitism taking place, and yet there’s no longer lasting conspiracy theory probably in the history of this world than the despicable conspiracy theory that Jews are to blame for everything because that has been a time-tested conspiracy theory. And it’s one that bigots go back to again and again. So it’s dismaying, but I suppose not altogether surprising that we’re seeing it yet again. 

Jane Coaston: Robert, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. 

Robert Draper: It’s my pleasure, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Robert Draper, a New York Times journalist with a focus on the politics of the American right. We’ll link to his piece about Fuentes in the show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of CNN’s Jake Tapper] But the decision to not fund the government means very real pain caused today. People not getting paychecks today and SNAP funds today. And then obviously at airports across the country, um delays are getting worse due to air traffic controller shortages. The FAA says um that in the New York area, nearly 90 percent, 90 percent of air traffic controllers are out. The White House says that Thanksgiving travel could be a disaster if this shutdown continues that long. Um. Are Democrats prepared to keep the government closed through Thanksgiving if it comes to that? 

[clip of Hakeem Jeffries] The question is, why are Republicans continuing to keep the government shut down? 

Jane Coaston: No, the question is, why is the blame game continuing? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that Republicans could reopen the government if they wanted to. But what does this stalemate mean for us, the people? Well, money is continuing to run out for federal safety net programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps about one in eight Americans buy groceries. Two federal judges ruled nearly simultaneously on Friday that the Trump administration must continue to fund SNAP using contingency funds during the shutdown. But officials said it was too late to stop recipients from losing benefits on Saturday and that restoring them could take at least a week. The shutdown also means upcoming holiday travel could be hampered. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Face the Nation on Sunday that airport delays are, quote, “going to get worse.” He also noted that some air traffic controllers haven’t been paid in over a month. And President Trump is trying out a new strategy to reopen the government by calling on Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome objections and gives the minority Democrats a check on GOP power. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Sunday Morning Futures that Republicans should listen to Trump because Democrats haven’t shown any sign of budging. 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] These are crazed people that President Trump and Republicans are having to deal with. And that’s why President Trump has said Republicans need to get tough, they need to get smart, and they need use this option to get rid of the filibuster, to reopen the government and do right by the American public. 

Jane Coaston: Pretty sure there are other ways to reopen the government, Karoline. And somewhere, noted filibuster lover Mitch McConnell is very annoyed. President Trump turned his ever-wandering attention to Nigeria over the weekend, claiming on Truth Social that, quote, “radical Islamists are killing thousands of Christians in the country.” If you’re thinking, this seems kind of random, here’s a bit of background. Nigeria’s population is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and both have been attacked by extremist groups over the years. Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group, has targeted Christians and Muslims it doesn’t think are Muslim enough. It’s a very complex geopolitical problem. Unless, apparently, you’re President Trump, who announced Friday that he’s re-designating Nigeria as a country of particular concern because, in his view, it’s failing to stop this alleged persecution of Christians. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu responded with a statement on Twitter Saturday, saying in part, quote, “Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so. Nigeria opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it.” But that wasn’t enough for Trump. Who doubled down on Truth Social just a few hours later, writing, quote, “If the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria and may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.” On Sunday, an advisor to President Tinubu told Reuters that Nigeria would welcome the United States’ help, as long as it, quote, “recognizes our territorial integrity.” So, more foreign wars. Maybe. And will we take Christian refugees from Nigeria? You know the answer to that one. President Trump sat down with Nora O’Donnell on 60 Minutes this weekend, and when asked if he’d use U.S. Forces to defend Taiwan, gave a response that sounds like a preview for a television show finale. Would you order U. S. forces to defend Taiwan? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] You’ll find out if it happens. And he understands the answer to that. 

[clip of Norah O’Donnell] Why not say it? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] This never even came up yesterday as a subject. He never brought it up. People were a little surprised at that. He never brought it up because he understands it. And he understand it very well. 

Jane Coaston: Does he? It’s Trump’s first time back on 60 Minutes since cashing out of his $16 million lawsuit against CBS over a 2024 interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris. His lawyers claim that then-candidate Trump suffered, quote, “mental anguish” over CBS editing the interview in a way that made a Harris comment seem more coherent than it actually was. Sure. Still, O’Donnell pressed Trump, albeit gingerly, about what Chinese President Xi Jinping understands would happen if they invaded Taiwan. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] They understand what’s going to happen, and he has openly said, and his people have openly said at meetings, we would never do anything while President Trump is president, because they know the consequences. 

Jane Coaston: Have they? Trump made a similar claim about how Xi assured him that he wouldn’t invade Taiwan while Trump was president back in August. A Chinese official responded to Reuters with, quote, “the Taiwan issue is purely an internal affair of China and how to resolve the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese people.” Ominous. Trump is set to host Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa for talks at the White House this month, an administration official said Saturday. The official who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity said that the meeting between Trump and al-Sharaa is expected to take place November 10th. And during his visit, al-Sharaa is expected to sign an agreement on joining the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. Trump and al-Sharaa have met in the past, but this would be the first ever visit by a Syrian president to the White house. It would also be quite a 180 for al-Sharaa who once had ties to al-Qaeda and a U.S. bounty of $10 million on his head. After al-Sharaa’s forces helped topple the Assad regime in Syria last year, he was appointed president. The meeting is part of Trump’s peace presidency, as he continues working towards durable peace in the Middle East and nowhere else. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, congratulate the Los Angeles Dodgers for winning the World Series in a Game 7 that tested the nerves of millions of people, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how the Dodgers had to tie the game in the 9th inning and had their first lead in the 11th inning, and somehow even saying that all doesn’t describe how nuts the entire game was, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and today the Dodgers will celebrate in a victory parade in LA. And then I hope World Series MVP and clutch pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto gets to take the best nap in the history of naps. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Caitlin Plummer, and Ethan Obermann. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today form the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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