Donald Trump didn’t just win the 2024 election, he did it by building the most racially and ethnically diverse electoral coalition of any Republican presidential candidate ever. Partly, he did that by drawing in minority voters who, prior to Trump’s rise, had voted Democratic despite holding conservative views. And partly he did it by winning over disaffected, not-especially-ideological voters of all races who believed he could deliver a stronger economy and lower inflation.

“In order to have a majority coalition in this country, the coalition has to not entirely make sense,” says our guest this week, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, whose 2023 book Party of the People lays out how and why Donald Trump, of all people, was building a more diverse Republican voter base. And indeed, as the Iran war pushes up gasoline prices and the price level more broadly fails to fall, we’re seeing a lot of strain on Trump’s coalition, with the members who joined in hopes of getting low prices especially likely to fall away.

Patrick offers us his theory of how Republicans can avoid a cataclysm in this year’s midterm — it has, in part, to do with the semiquincentennial — and we discuss whether every election is going to be a “change” election from now onward.

Also this week, Ben, Megan and I discuss what “everybody knew” about Eric Swalwell, and whether we’d be better off with more insider gossip thrown out into the open — remember, that’s what Gawker did, and people got pretty tired of Gawker by the end. And we look at the prospect of a United Airlines-American Airlines merger, which United CEO Scott Kirby reportedly floated to the president himself.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thanks to all of you who tuned into my live video with and ! I thought our conversation about Trump’s polling and about Democrats Senate prospects in 2026 was really interesting and informative, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Here’s a playback for those of you who weren’t able to join us live. We’d love your feedback in the comments, …

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I first met Daniel Biss more than a decade ago when he was an Illinois state senator working to rein in that state’s unsustainable debts related to public employee pensions. Now, he’s the mayor of Evanston and very likely soon to be a member of Congress representing Chicago’s north side and northern suburbs. He just won the Democratic nomination in a hugely expensive primary election — over $10 million was spent, much of it by AIPAC-linked groups dissatisfied with his positioning as a “progressive Zionist.” We had an interesting conversation with Daniel about the changing way Democrats are relating to Israel, and the extent to which debates about the country are coming to dominate intraparty contests, even while voters tell pollsters the issue isn’t that important to them.

We also talk about Medicare for All — Daniel, like most of his opponents in the primary, says he supports it, but where’s the appetite for the sorts of broad-based tax increases that would be required to finance it? How would progressives go about convincing the public that it’s worth paying more taxes to receive more government services? Daniel sits well to my left, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve met in elected office, and I think the conversation we had with him on these topics was really interesting.

We also check in on the Iran war — Jamie Kirchick sat in for Ben who’s off this week, and took up the thankless job of being the panelist who thinks some good could actually come from all of this.

We talk about Gavin Newsom’s emergent strategy when fighting Republicans on the internet: calling them gay. Barney Frank says this is homophobic, but Newsom’s office tells The New York Times something I fully believe: the staffers writing the “you’re gay” tweets are themselves gay. But what might make sense as an in-joke among the gays sounds weird when put in the mouth of a straight politician, and it’s part of a broader issue with gay Democratic communicators amusing themselves by putting gay words in their straight bosses’ mouths. Are we really supposed to believe that 83-year-old House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro is making jokes about Rita Ora and the Khia Asylum? Let’s let straight Democrats be straight again.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thanks to all of you who tuned in for my and Megan’s Substack live chat with Phil Chan, who accompanied me to La Traviata at the New York Metropolitan Opera this week, and who has fascinating ideas about how to save opera — updating it to make it more relevant to modern audiences, drawing in younger attendees, and ultimately making it more financially sustainable at a time when opera organizations like the Met are under severe financial stress.

If you weren’t able to join us live for the conversation, a replay is available here for paying subscribers. And here are some relevant links:

• The New York Times on financial difficulties at the Met, which spent down more than 20% of its endowment last year to finance ongoing operations.

• And the Times on similar financial difficulties for for-profit Broadway producers, who keep losing money on musicals and are increasingly turning to less-expensive plays.

• WGBH on Phil’s 2023 reimagining of Madama Butterfly for the Boston Lyric Opera.

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We hope you enjoyed the conversation and we look forward to being back in your ears next week.

Best,

Josh

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The Trump administration has been very clear: they have four key objectives in the Iran war, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not one of them. That’s England’s job! We could end the war without doing it. Also, we won’t end the war until the strait is open. Who knows? It’s almost like they’re making the whole thing up as they go along.

Marc Caputo, White House Correspondent for Axios, joins the podcast this week to help us understand how Trump and his advisers are deciding what to do, and how they are preparing (or not) for the domestic political blowback from an extended disruption in oil markets. We also get his view from south Florida on the ongoing Republican dominance of that state — what the party did right to win solid majorities of Florida voters, and whether they face any danger from Trump’s national unpopularity and a cost of living crisis that, in Florida, takes the particular form of high housing prices and skyrocketing homeowner’s insurance costs.

Plus, Megan came in for a two-minutes hate this week for describing how she uses AI in her writing process — primarily, in the way one would use a human research assistant. We talk about the right way to use AI as a journalist, and the roots of the anti-AI fervor among journalists: one obvious reason is that many people are badly misusing AI — see the New York Times book reviewer who used an AI engine to plagiarize the Guardian — but another is that slop is a product category that long predates the rise of AI, and it used to be labor intensive in a way that it will not need to be going forward.

We hope you enjoy the show. Also, we hope you join us on Thursday at 1pm eastern for my conversation with opera director Phil Chan, who stood up to Timothée Chalamet by taking me to see the Metropolitan Opera’s production of La Traviata this week. We’re going to talk about why people should care about the opera, and what opera institutions can do, other than complain about remarks like Chalamet’s, to convince younger generations that they should “give a shit” about the art form. To catch that live chat, go to centralairpodcast.com or join us in the Substack app.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

This is a fun one! Tyler Austin Harper joins the show this week to talk about his reporting on the Mellon Foundation and its role in pushing humanities academia in the direction of progressive social activism, his on-the-ground take from Maine on Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, what literature can teach us about the politics of human extinction, and why the commentariat is souring on all these polyamory memoirs we keep getting.

We hope you enjoy the show! If you have responses, please share them in the comments below.

Best,

Josh

Since you likely know how I feel about the Kennedys, you can probably guess how I feel about Jack Schlossberg, the useless fuckboy grandson of John F. Kennedy who is running to be my congressman. Schlossberg doesn’t have a career or accomplishments — or labor income, for that matter — but he does have a large inheritance, and people on the internet say he’s sexually attractive, though personally I can’t see it. As Jonathan Chait wrote last month, you can’t even accuse him of having failed upward, because “failing requires having been entrusted with some responsibility in the first place.” This heterosexual twink is completely void of distinction, and I will be extremely annoyed if he ends up representing me in Congress.

But probably, he won’t win. It’s a big field, and one of his opponents, Assemblyman Alex Bores, joined us on Central Air this week. Unlike Schlossberg, Bores is a serious person with real accomplishments — he’s the author of New York’s controversial AI regulation law, the RAISE Act, so we asked him to join us to talk about the fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, and about how rules should be made about how AI gets used in the public sector. We also got to talk with him about Ben’s “Free Willy” experiment, how to deal with the electrical demands of data centers, and what Manhattan in particular needs from Congress.

We also have an update on Iran — Ben now thinks he may have been a little too optimistic about how this war would go, we check in again on the financial markets, and we discuss the rumors that the new ayatollah doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time in the straight of Hormuz, if you catch our drift.

Plus, we talk about the disappointing housing bill working its way through congress with a big, bad idea from Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, and we look at McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski and his pride in his hot new product, the Big Arch.

We hope you enjoy the show,

Josh

Thanks to everyone who turned into today’s live chat with (of the excellent podcast Across the Movie Aisle) and !

We had a great chat about 2025 in movies, and about the post-COVID business model that the film industry is still grappling toward. We heard how Alyssa learned to appreciate horror films, got Ben’s movie lot memories, and discussed my proposal that David Ellison should raze the Paramount lot and build thousands and thousands of new homes right in the core of Hollywood — apparently, this would be unpopular with some people in the industry.

If you weren’t able to join us live, a replay is here for paying subscribers. Enjoy!

Best,

Josh

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This week, Mike Solana of Pirate Wires joins us to talk about Silicon Valley. He’s been talking with lots of billionaires who are taking steps to exit California in anticipation of a proposed wealth tax. We discuss how credible those threats are — lots of people talk a good game about moving to Miami and make it through one summer — and what makes the wealth tax different from prior soak-the-rich tax proposals. And we discuss the likely opposition — the proposal is far from a fait accompli, and it’s even opposed by a lot of Democrats, including Gavin Newsom and Katie Porter.

We also talk about the alleged “Gay Tech Mafia,” of which Wired magazine says Mike is a member. Does it exist? Does it run Silicon Valley? Is it headquartered at the Castro branch of Barry’s Bootcamp? How can we get invited to its fabulous parties? Mike reveals all.

Also this week: we look at the gyrating price of oil. Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business said on Sunday that commodities traders are “imbeciles” who overreact to news, and indeed, oil prices did fall sharply Monday after spiking on Friday. They didn’t fall for quite the reason Charlie proposed — “within days we will 100% control the supply of oil coming out of the Straits of Hormuz,” he promised — but the markets seem to be pricing in an expectation that tensions will quickly de-escalate in one way or another. But… what if they don’t?

Finally, we look at the outrage over Timothée Chalamet saying “no one cares” about ballet or opera, which we think is largely coming from people who do not themselves go to the ballet or the opera, and Megan tries to convince us that we should actually go to the opera.

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We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thank you to everyone who tuned in for my live video chat with of Semafor and ! We had an interesting and lively conversation about the Texas primaries — how James Talarico prevailed over Jasmine Crockett, and how Republicans ended up with a runoff, where they must endeavor to avoid nominating a candidate so unappealing he could actually lose Texas.

We also look at why Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost, and how, in Texas Republican politics, being potentially disloyal to Trump is apparently worse than sleeping with your staffer who then set herself on fire.

If you weren’t able to join us live, we have a playback here for paying subscribers. You can sign up to watch that and get all of these future lunchtime live chats that we do with interesting reporters, pollsters and commentators.

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We’re back with another episode of Central Air and this time it is a bit of a crossover: Jesse Singal, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, joins us to discuss the shift toward more cautious thinking among (some of) the U.S. medical societies about youth gender medicine. (Jesse wrote on this for The New York Times last week.) We talk about how “The Science” got so far ahead of the science on this topic, and the forces that made a change in thinking faster to come to Europe than the U.S. We also talk about the bizarre, totalitarian media environment that has surrounded these issues, with GLAAD attempting to squish journalistic coverage of the weak evidence supporting youth gender medicine practices (initially with significant success) and about why the side question of sports has often gotten more media attention than the issue of medical treatment.

And then Ben, Megan and I discuss Ben’s surprising optimism about the situation in Iran, which I do not share.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Wow, some of you had strong opinions about last week’s episode. Sometimes they were even strongly positive opinions! But not always. Here at Central Air, we hear your feedback, and we promise no Donald Trump impressions this week — but we can’t promise that forever, because we are fiercely independent journalists who don't take orders from anyone, not even our paying customers.

What we do have for you this week is a conversation with Tim Miller, host of The Bulwark podcast, about his recent trip to Minnesota, the apparent continuation of significant but less bombastic ICE operations in the state, and why we differ on the extent to which immigration is a political pitfall for Democrats in 2026, 2028 and 2029 — and on how much is gained by talking a lot about how terrible Donald Trump is.

We also talk about the especially lively debate on left-wing Twitter about whether it is pro-social for mentally ill homeless people to pee on the subway, and an undercurrent of discontent that’s driving that debate — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is increasingly breaking with the far left, including by having the NYPD resume sweeps of homeless encampments on city streets. As Tim notes, one thing that’s good about being charismatic is you can defy your core supporters and they let you get away with it.

Plus, we talk about the Supreme Court rebuke of Trump’s tariffs and we discuss the Citrini memo, a document that proposed an implausible scenario of an AI-driven financial crisis — but not implausible enough to be ignored by the stock market on Monday, apparently. (I also wrote about this yesterday).

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thank you to the several hundred of you who tuned in for my live chat with and . We had an interesting conversation about his recent poll for The Argument on trans issues; the failure of the “no debate” strategy pursued by trans activists (see, for example, the ineffectual GLAAD letter to The New York Times); and how Democrats and trans activists both might be expected to respond to recent rightward shifts in public opinion on topics from youth medical treatments to sports to bathrooms.

If you weren’t able to join us over lunch, we have a playback of the conversation here for paying subscribers (and thank you for your support of Central Air!)

Subscribe now

We’ll be back in your ears with another full episode next week.

Best,

Josh

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It’s a very special week here on Central Air, because Cartoons Hate Her joins us to make her argument that Democrats need a presidential candidate who “fucks.”

First we try to figure out what this figurative sense of “fuck” means exactly — “fucking is in your heart,” says CHH — and then we apply the analysis to the field of politics. Some calls are easy — John F. Kennedy fucked; Michael Dukakis did not fuck — but there are closer calls, like Margaret Thatcher, who may have fucked in some weird British psychosexual way, and there are candidates who fucked too much, like Gary Hart. We look at the elephant in the room — Gavin Newsom, who obviously fucks but obviously should not be the Democratic nominee — and we scour the rest of the field for potential fuckage. Perhaps Josh Shapiro would fuck if we got him some contact lenses and a leather jacket? We consider all possible angles.

Also this week: We have a very special surprise guest who helps us understand the bizarre phenomenon of “looksmaxxing,” recently covered in a 2,800-word New York Times profile of Braden Peters, a.k.a. Clavicular, the famous 20-year-old moron who improves his bone structure by hitting himself in the face with a hammer. (Peters, unsurprisingly, is a Newsom supporter.) And CHH gives her take on one of my favorite questions: are straight people okay?

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Everyone loves to talk about affordability these days, or more specifically, they love to complain about unaffordability. But what are they actually complaining about? At least four things, we think: inflation, interest rates, real incomes, and income distribution — or, basically, the whole economy.

We invited Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School who co-directs The Budget Lab there, and who previously served as an economic official at the Treasury Department under President Biden, to join us for this conversation. We discuss how the Biden team let the affordability problem sneak up on them, in the form of excessive inflation, and about what public policies would actually cause voters to feel that things were getting more affordable — and what to do about the fact that some voters appear to be waiting for prices to go back to 2019 levels, which is never going to happen.

We also talk about interest rates, and what might happen to them if President Trump gets his way on monetary policy. (In short, not what he thinks would happen.) We grade Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh on a curve, giving him a gentleman’s C which, we will remind you, is a passing grade. (I wrote on that theme last week, if you didn’t see it.)

And finally, as a way of addressing the allegation that the “affordability crisis” is just young people whining about DoorDash prices, we look into the alleged phenomenon of “white people tacos,” which Briahna Joy Gray says contain black olives. Ben and Megan say this is made up, but I say we all know what Gray is talking about here — haven’t you seen canned black olives in a taco salad? — and the terminology doesn’t mean that all white people make bad tacos.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

We’re really excited to have Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times and host of the Times’s “Interesting Times” podcast, join us for this week’s show. On this week’s agenda:

• Giving the Epstein Files the Washington Read

• A sincere effort to learn something useful from this Epstein experience

• Men behaving badly, forever

• How Ross got his job as the official explainer of Trumpism to liberal America

  • Is he qualified?

• Kanye for New Haven

• Which presidents were worse than Joe Biden? And be specific

  • Mental note to do a segment on a future show about the underrated virtues of Jimmy Carter

• Ross tells us to pay more attention to AI

  • This requires talking about Moltbook, sorry

• How to think about efforts to build the AI god if you already believe in God

• Peter Thiel and his “over-indexing” on his Greta Thunberg theory of the Antichrist

  • Aren’t religious conservatives getting weirdly comfortable with a heresy here?

    • No Ben, not sodomy

We hope you enjoy the episode! We’d love to hear any of your thoughts or responses in the comments below.

Thanks for listening,

Josh

We’re back with another episode of Central Air and this week we’re joined by Jerusalem Demsas, Editor-in-Chief of avowedly liberal publication The Argument. Jerusalem makes the case for immigration advocates to ride the thermostatic shift toward support for immigration without avoiding the political traps that befell Democrats under Joe Biden.

We also talk about what sort of bargain Democrats should try to drive about funding the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the abuses they’ve perpetrated in Minneapolis, and we look at one aspect of The Argument’s project: getting liberals to stop acting like they’re “temporarily-embarrassed communists” and take pride in their own coherent worldview.

Meanwhile, we consider Moderna’s announcement that the US policy environment has turned too anti-vaccine to support expensive research into certain mRNA applications for fighting infectious disease. And Ben makes a case for one of the ugliest vegetables around — celeriac, also known as celery root. When shopping for celery root, “the dirtier, the better” — that’s what Emilie Berner, chef-instructor of plant-based culinary arts at the Institute for Culinary Education, told Martha Stewart — and Ben agrees.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and !

If you weren’t able to join us live, we have a playback here for paying subscribers. You can hear our conversation on topics such as:

• How can the market make Trump chicken out if it already knows Trump will chicken out and therefore ought to price in the expectation that he will chicken out?

• Gold prices (what’s the deal with them?)

• The plight of the tall, who, like the victims of the Khmer Rouge, are constantly faced with weirdly-shaped jackets and too-low countertops

• Ben’s louche appearance

• Large, valuable rocks

• Subway ads for the Joint Strike Fighter

• The Canadian Olympic snowboarder drug kingpin who got arrested in Mexico today

• His lawyer, who used to have the username “cocainelawyer” on Instagram, and who (surprise!) got indicted too

• Who is “Clavicular,” the teenage far-right “looksmaxxing” influencer who started steroids in his early teen years and says the secret to being energetic is meth and maybe hits himself in the face with a hammer and thinks Gavin Newsom would be a better president than JD Vance because he’s more attractive? And most importantly, where are his parents?

We hope you enjoyed the live chat and we look forward to seeing you again for our regular show next Wednesday!

Best,

Josh

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Central Air is back and we have good news: Ben, Megan and I will be doing another Substack live video chat this Friday at 12:30 pm Eastern / 9:30 am Pacific. We’ll talk about the World Economic Forum — hey, at least the Davos confab has never been more relevant! — and Greenland and tariffs and whatever other nonsense you want to ask us about.

You’ll see a link to join the conversation if you come to our web page (link below) or open the Substack app on Friday. And if you can’t join us live on Friday, a replay of the conversation will be available for paying subscribers, again at either of those locations.

On this week’s show, we discuss our exasperation at Greenlandpolitik and consider an endgame where Trump simply declares that he has Greenland without actually doing anything besides coloring in the map. We discuss Kamala Harris’s staff’s insinuation that Josh Shapiro was too poor to be vice president and also clothe his wife. We discuss the oral arguments in the trans sports cases before the Supreme Court and try our hands at the “what is a woman?” question that keeps tripping up Democrats. (Some of the simple answers become hard if you don’t want to say “no” to “Is Caitlin Jenner a woman?”) And we look at the already-ongoing capital flight from California in response to the proposed billionaire wealth tax and discuss how one can even stop the capital flight in a state where anyone can propose the ballot measure over and over again.

We hope you enjoy the episode! Have responses? Complaints? Adulation? Please leave these in the comments below.

Best,

Josh

We’re back with another episode of Central Air! This week, we look at the bombshell at the Federal Reserve: the bank was served with subpoenas related to a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell’s congressional testimony about cost overruns for the Fed’s headquarters renovations, and Powell responded with a direct-to-camera video pledging to resist this use of a pretextual criminal investigation to pressure him and the bank to lower interest rates. We consider why the financial markets have had a muted reaction, and we play out how the Fed might work if Powell’s term as chair expires and senators refuse to confirm any new board members, as Sen. Thom Tillis has already threatened.

We also discuss the Minnesota ICE shooting. Then, Steve Morris of The Long Run joins us to discuss the groveling apology that gay liberal comedians Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers had to offer for showing insufficient respect to our lord and savior Jasmine Crockett. We also look at the problems facing straight people — who these days seem to talk a lot about how awful the opposite sex is while having very little sex with the opposite sex. This is sad! Maybe they can learn something from the gays about how to self-actualize.

We hope you enjoy the episode. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Josh