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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.JD Vance is having a moment. He’s selling his new book and he just appeared on The View, where the hosts worked him over pretty hard. In a telling exchange, Vance found himself defending Trump in the context of the Iran war in a way that will come back to bite him later. Indeed, there are several other signs that Trumpworld is setting up Vance to take the eventual fall on Iran in a number of different ways. New leaks from inside the administration are making Trump’s Iran deal look even worse, and they’re also shedding light on what this shivving of Vance really entails.We’re talking about it all with one of the best observers out there of the intersection between politics and culture, New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia, always nice to have you on.Virginia Heffernan: Hey, Greg, same here. I like being on the show.Sargent: Well, we like that. So let’s start with JD Vance’s appearance on The View. He took a hammering on a number of fronts. I want to highlight one exchange, though. They’re talking about inflation. JD says, We’re doing all we can. Then one of the hosts points out that Trump recently said, I love the inflation. Listen to this.JD Vance (voiceover): We’re doing a lot to make it better. It’s going to take a little bit of time. There’s a lot more work to do. But the president knows that a lot of Americans are struggling. In fact, he ran on that, he talked about it, and we’ve done some things and made some good progress on that point.Ana Navarro (voiceover): He just said he loves the inflation.Vance (voiceover): What he said, Ana, what he said is that he loves the fact that the inflation is going to come down when this war is over. That’s what he said.Joy Behar (voiceover): Are you his—wait, are you his interpreter or are you his vice president?Vance (voiceover): Well, look—what the president said—people were asking about the inflation, they were asking about the affordability problem, which, again, is very real. And what he said is, I love the inflation because it’s going to come down when the war is over.Sargent: Joy Behar got a good dig in there saying that Vance is just functioning basically as Trump’s propagandist and not leveling with people, although she said it in a way that kind of kept it light. Virginia, what did you make of the exchange?Heffernan: I don’t know, do people still say “mogged?” I do think that JD Vance got mogged by the women of The View. They were all on top of him. He had said on Fox News the day before, or maybe earlier this morning, that he was trying to prepare for a civil conversation, but he knew he was going into the lion’s den.The inflation question is going to be really interesting to View viewers. JD Vance has this book come out about his Christian faith, about his Catholic faith, and he really wants everyone to focus on his religious journey because he believes that he can bond with the suburban women who sometimes lean Republican, especially on issues like crime, and he might get to them by The View.So he wasn’t going into the lion’s den for no reason. He was going into it to promote a book. And they gave the QR code so you could buy the book at the end. They did their part. And they gave him a onesie for his forthcoming newborn that says The View on it. But—Sargent: I have to ask—do you think that JD Vance and Usha are going to put that onesie on their baby?Heffernan: I was wondering about that. Maybe that was just another mog moment; we’ll brand you with The View, brand your baby. We don’t want to get too symbolic about it, but there was a lot going on and it’s a lot to watch.And Whoopi and some of the other hosts of color were especially incensed and didn’t give any ground. And there was something satisfying about seeing that, because we’ve seen Trump attack so many women over and over again in interviews, walk out of interviews, call women “nasty,” call them “piggy,” call them whatever. And so just saying, We’re not really going to entertain the idea that there’s a kumbaya here with you, and making it very clear with their expressions that they weren’t going to entertain it.Sargent: JD was really on his best behavior, though. We should point that out. What do you think of the inflation exchange? Because I want to clarify for people that the inflation exchange is really about inflation from the war. That’s what Trump was talking about when he said, I love the inflation. It maneuvered Vance into a position where he was essentially forced to defend what Trump said there. What did you make of the exchange?Heffernan: So what Vance says is he didn’t mean he loves the inflation, he meant, I love that the inflation is going to go down after the war. For some reason, everything these days is reminding me of this moment in The Simpsons. I can’t remember what season it is, but Krusty the Clown or someone who’s trying to kill Bart has “Die Bart Die” tattooed on his chest. And when it’s revealed—“Die Bart Die”—he says, No, this is just German. “Die Bart Die.”And I love that because no, he didn’t say I love the inflation. He said I love that the inflation is going down. “Die Bart Die.” There’s no way that that’s what he was saying. Everybody knows that’s not what he was saying. For JD Vance to introduce doublespeak, to introduce propaganda, really shows how he’s on his back foot.Sargent: I want to add something about that exchange as well. As you say, it’s a stretch, as Vance said, that Trump was claiming that he loves the fact that inflation will come down after the war. I think Trump was more saying, I don’t give a shit about the inflation because the problem’s going to magically go away because I say it is, and that’s it, and you should make it go away in your head. That’s what he actually meant.But seriously, there’s another vulnerability here, which is that Vance is tying himself to the idea that costs will come down significantly after the war. In other words, he’s endorsing that idea and aligning himself with it. That’s going to take a while. Whatever actually happens with costs, I’m not sure the public’s going to feel good about costs anytime soon. So Vance has been maneuvered into a position where he’s tied to defending that big, big, big thing about the Trump term, which is a very, very tough thing to defend.Heffernan: It’s asking people to pay more for groceries in exchange for some foreign policy goal that keeps shifting, that we don’t understand. And that, frankly, the administration did nothing to gin up support for. We don’t even have a narrative about why we’re in Iran. They weren’t building nukes—or were they? Nobody is following this enriched uranium conversation or whatever JD Vance is saying this new Iran deal is, which sounds like the last, or good, Iran deal, except worse.Nobody understands what we’re doing there, just as they didn’t understand Venezuela and they didn’t understand the first attack on Iran. This has not been sold to the American people, and yet we’re asked to make a sacrifice for it. We’re asked to pay more for groceries while he keeps telling us affordability is a hoax and that he loves inflation. This is the signature piece of foreign policy, clearly.It reads to the American people as, We’ve gone to war for Israel and we don’t know why. Nobody has a stake in figuring out this nuclearized Iran because we keep not understanding it. The only thing we understand is we’re paying more, something about the Strait of Hormuz, and this is all Trump’s fault. We have then no faith in him. There’s not even a strong base that’s trying to spin up support for it. What they just say back is, It’s a hoax, or, You’re nasty for asking questions about it.Sargent: A hundred percent. There are clear signs that Vance is getting set up now to take the fall for the Iran deal if it goes south. Axios reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Trump and other top officials that the intel agencies seriously doubt that Iran will ultimately make the concessions that Trump will demand in terms of constraints on its nuclear enrichment program.This is a really key thing. I want to read it: “In internal discussions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding announced Sunday, while Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.”Virginia, that’s strongly suggestive. People around Trump who expect—rightly—that he’s going to have serious trouble pinning Iran down when the talks on nukes get going, want it very clear that Vance internally rooted for this deal. We’re talking here about people who are sympathetic to Hegseth and Rubio. What do you make of that?Heffernan: As you said before, I think he’s being shivved. The person who is least confident in Trump’s decisions around foreign policy—as we’ve seen from his past disputes with Trump and Hegseth, and pretty aggressive, meaningful isolationism—is having to defend those things and then babble about how bad Obama was, about whatever comes into his head, because the details of the deal have never been fully exposed. We don’t know what they are.But we don’t even know what our objective is. The objective of the first deal was to prevent supposedly breakout capacity from Iran so that they couldn’t turn what they had into nukes. That was a deal that the UN was invested in with its nonproliferation treaty. It was a deal that Iran was ultimately invested in because it got a lot of goodies, and that it complied with.But now, are we trying to prevent breakout capacity? What’s the time horizon? What are the things that an ordinary diplomat would ask about with this deal? No, it’s just Trump trying to humiliate people or be humiliated himself. Iran has gone to psychologists to say, what is it like to deal with—remember with Nixon, he was exercising the madman option? Well, Trump’s madman-ness is nonoptional. He is a madman. He’s not choosing, Am I going to act like a madman? He just is.This isn’t a question of Democrats saying, He’s crazy. This is a question of, if you are negotiating with this person, how do you talk to an actually insane person? How do you flatter his ego, do XYZ? Iran is very likely to get away with some pretty hideous things with JD Vance scrambling to defend him, being shivved by the president, and the president himself insane. And Hegseth pretty insane.Sargent: To pick up on this idea of JD Vance getting shivved and this idea that you mentioned of Vance being somewhat of a skeptic of this stuff—he’s getting screwed in two ways. Not only was he initially skeptical of this thing, but now he’s got to be the one to defend the deal in a more frontal way than anyone else. Everybody knows that vice presidents are on the hook for that as a general matter. They’re supposed to go out and take a lot of shit for the president. That’s just part of the role. Everyone knows that. And now he’s got to go out there and defend this deal when everyone knows it’s a complete joke and nobody else has to be as frontal as him.Heffernan: It really would be Marco Rubio who should be talking about it. But Trump is way more threatened by JD Vance’s future career than he is by Little Marco’s. And so he wants Vance out there and he wants Vance to have to do the doublespeak that he’s getting him to do. Also speak for something that he doesn’t know about, because nobody has seen this deal. This deal is like Pam Bondi’s, I have the list of Epstein’s people on my desk. There may be a piece of yellow paper with some Sharpie scribbles on it, but we don’t know what this piece of supposed diplomacy is.He’s just going to end up making no sense. It’s like hang Mike Pence. The version of hang Mike Pence for now is hang JD Vance out to dry.Sargent: Very well put. There are more signs of Vance getting set up here. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark highlighted a number of statements from Trump-friendly people. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a staunch Trump ally, described Vance as “the architect of the deal.” Very, very clear. This is Vance’s deal, says Senator Lindsey Graham, who probably hates the deal and thinks it’s going to fall apart later. That’s a key point. Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a real Iran hawk—I hate that phrase, but whatever—he’s an Iran hawk who expects this deal to not produce any real results later. And he’s saying that JD Vance is the architect of this deal which will fall apart later. That really screws him.Trump himself recently said that JD Vance will probably be at the signing ceremony instead of him. We’ll see how that pans out, but it’s really obvious where all the arrows are pointing.Heffernan: I don’t think Lindsey Graham cares about getting out of Iran. He probably would be happy with forever war. It seems to be his sweet spot, and certainly Pete Hegseth’s. But Trump does have trouble on his hands if this—every day this war continues, it’s expensive. It’s very, very, very unpopular. He wants a way to back out of it, but he doesn’t want to make something called “the Iran deal,” because an Iran deal is supposedly what made Obama seem effete, seem like a globalist, seem like he didn’t understand hard power. So here he is making an Iran deal in order to back out of the optional war of choice that he started for no reason to get attention.Sargent: Trump wants it to be Iran’s surrender. That’s what he wants.Heffernan: He wants an Iran surrender and they are not—there is no white flag from Iran. The other thing is: We haven’t had this open collision with Iran ever. We’re starting to see their cards. And they have played the propaganda war very well. The Lego videos have mostly been taken down, but those were really influential. And “Your Government Is Run by Pedophiles,” their hit song of the summer—you can still find that. It was on Spotify and rising up the ranks.Americans have paradoxically acquired at least some understanding, if not sympathy, for Iran. For Iran being a closed rogue state, defined as the most hated nation on earth for all this time, and suddenly people have started to think, There’s schoolgirls there. There’s schoolgirls that were killed by a bomb. The consequences of this for geopolitics are going to be felt forever. And it’s just on somebody’s whim. What a nightmare.Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there. There’s the global economy as well, which is going to continue to be in a really ailing state because of all this.Let’s spool this forward and see what it looks like. So down the line, maybe Trump reaches this stupendous deal with Iran in two to three months before the midterms. I don’t think that’s likely. I think it’s more likely to drag out and the Iranians have every incentive to drag it right up to the midterms to hurt Trump as much as possible.We start to get into next year, and then that’s when the presidential race starts. At that point, Trump is really checked out. He’s passing from the scene. And so next year you’ve got JD Vance as the frontman to defend all of the legacy of the Iran war. We’re talking about the global economy. We’re talking about potential trouble that they run into with getting Iran to constrain its nuke program. We’re talking about the money that’s going to start flowing to Iran—which, when Obama did that, was this huge betrayal of America according to Trump. How does Vance manage all this in, I don’t know, March or April of next year?Heffernan: As you point out, there are Republicans who hate the Iran deal and want to see it fail, like Lindsey Graham, because they’re hawks, because they are really invested in this idea of Iran as a rogue state in opposition to Israel as a democracy and an ally in the region—which has also shifted in popular imagination, yet that’s something that a Lindsey Graham is going to hold on to. So you have old-school Republican hawks who are going to hate that there’s a deal at all.Then you have people for whom the deal is bound to fail. At very least, even when you talk about this perfect deal idea—the first Iran deal was close, it was a B-plus as a deal at least—it takes a while to bear fruit. You can call it a failure at any given time because you could say, Well, they’ll have this breakout capacity in 10 years, 15 years, we should have gotten it in perpetuity. They can always be flexing. We can suddenly be like, The uranium is enriched to 68 percent, so it’s a failure.There’s absolutely no way that an Iran deal of any kind is going to play as a success with the American people. The only way that this could come to a soft landing for them is if prices go steeply down, if affordability goes up, if the strait is completely open and free, and if we have a complete surrender by Iran. And none of that is possible either.So they’re not going to get there. Jamelle Bouie says that they reiterate the logic of domination in these wars. What they want to see is Iran crying in pain. That seems like a fool’s errand. It’s not a very Iranian position. They have shown that they’re refusing to do that.This is an impossible position. JD Vance is so in a corner. It’s impossible for him to make a friend. Tucker Carlson is just going to hold him responsible. Tucker Carlson, who hates this war, who broke with Trump over this war, who begged Trump not to go to war, and now opposes Trump and is sort of the leader of this particular—maybe running for office himself, right? We shouldn’t rule that out. If JD Vance had been able to stay with Tucker Carlson and have that group of people on his side, he might have had a chance in 2028. But you know what it is? He’s tarred with the brush of the war and he’s tarred with the brush of the deal. That’s as bad as it gets. Both things are going to cling to him and both things are huge failures.Sargent: Just to really boil this down, basically every major element of the MAGA coalition will dislike whatever emerges here, so they’ll dislike Vance for it. And all the constituencies that Republicans, especially Trumpy Republicans like JD Vance, need to win majorities—young people, working-class nonwhites—they’ll also hate it. So that’s where Vance is.Heffernan: That’s where Vance is. I’m not going to say I feel sorry for him, but just strategically, he is in a very, very bad spot. I don’t see a way out of it for him. I don’t see where his reputation is at the end of this.Sargent: I don’t either. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.Heffernan: Thank you.

What if you had the chance to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby—would you take it? For The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, the famous thought experiment offered the starting point for his debut novel, Killing Baby Hitler, an eccentric journey through history, counter-histories, and a dark future that bears an unsettling resemblance to our present. In the world of the book, the climate has dramatically worsened; humans rely on (and sometimes have sex with) robot companions called filos; and in place of the countries we know today are spheres ruled by billionaires (Trump One, for instance, or Thiel Two). A pair of scientists time-travel to 1889 Austria to find the baby who would grow up to perpetrate the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century. Their mission sets in motion an alternate past whose various likenesses and unlikenesses to what really happened underpin an abundance of jokes, allusions, and unnerving comparisons. In this conversation with Tomasky, three colleagues—Emily Cooke, Kirsten Denker, and Alex Shephard—explore his research process, his influences, and his reaction to some of the book’s most prescient elements.Alex Shephard: I’ve always wanted to say that our guest needs no introduction, but I have never been able to do so, because it has never been true. But now it is. Our guest is Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Michael has written a funny, biting new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, that is more or less about just that, although it is a little more complicated. Set in a dystopian 2141, the world in the future looks a lot like ours, just worse; divided into spheres of political influence and ravaged by climate change. A group of scientists discover time travel, and they go back to late nineteenth-century Austria to try to set their worlds right by killing baby Hitler. What follows is a sharp and sometimes scathing satire, and a novel that hopscotches between genres— speculative sci-fi, thriller. It’s also just a fun and funny novel. I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Cooke and Kirsten Denker, and also Michael Tomasky. Welcome.Michael Tomasky: Hey, that was great, thanks.Alex: I was wondering if we can start just by talking about the genesis for the novel itself. When did you get this idea, and when did you start to work through it? Michael: I seem to remember that I got the idea in late 2022 and I don’t remember exactly how. It just popped into my head one morning, I think, while I was exercising. The question obviously isn’t original to me. I did go and immediately Google to see if anybody had written a book about it. I didn’t turn up who anyone had, although I have subsequently been told that none other than Stephen Fry wrote a novel that was built around this idea back in 1996. I looked it up: It’s true, Michiko Kakutani absolutely savaged it in The New York Times. I haven’t even bothered to read it, because I’m just going to live with the idea that mine might actually be funnier than Stephen Fry’s. So anyway, I had the idea late 2022; it was my New Year’s resolution to sit down on New Year’s Day and just start writing and see what came out and see what happened. I was immediately confronted by the reality, which I hadn’t thought of, I admit, that if I’m going to write a novel about time travel, it probably needs to be set in the future when time travel might theoretically be plausible. So I just kind of picked 2141 randomly out of the air, and that’s when it’s set.Then I realized I have to build this world of 2141. You referenced how dystopian it is, although the idea, for example, that men like Peter Thiel or his heirs literally own countries, which is the case in my novel—that seemed a lot more far-fetched in early 2023, when I was writing that bit, than it seems now. So anyway, I created this world of 2141, and then the characters travel back to 1889 Austria, or at least two of them do, so I had to create that world. I actually did a lot of reading and research about that world. It’s a novel, so I make a lot of stuff up, but a lot of it is grounded in reality, too. Then of course there’s the question of whether they succeed and so on, but we’re not going to give that away.Emily Cooke: I’m curious—it’s essentially a comic novel. I found it really funny, but of course it describes all these very disturbing developments, not least the division of the world into these horrifying spheres owned by the mega-rich. Of course, it’s fiction, and also tonally it’s quite different from the sort of thing that you’re doing every day as the editor of this magazine and as a writer. I was wondering, was that difference part of the motivation to write it? Did you want a relief from the work that you normally do, or was there some way that engaging with this different form that performed that function for you? Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. In some ways it was a release from what I do, and from thinking about Donald Trump for 14 hours a day, and it was fun. I wrote it in this chair where I’m sitting, and I would come down here on Saturday morning at 7 o’clock before other people in my house were awake and start pounding it out, and I had a lot of fun writing it and letting my imagination run in that way. At the same time, it wasn’t that different from the work I and we do at TNR. It’s still a pretty political novel, as we’ve already established, and it deals in a lot of the stuff that we all have to think about, the way the world is turning very dark on us very fast. I wrote an exaggerated version of that, and it was fun to write, but it’s also sort of frightening to think about the fact that the world that I conjure up in 2141 (and there’s another section that’s in the 2060s) is also really bad. My own daughter will still be alive then, presumably, so it was kind of unsettling in some ways too. Kirsten Denker: You were saying how between your writing it and it being published, some things are actually seemingly a little bit less absurd than they were when you wrote them. I copyedited this book, but I also gave it another little read to sort of refresh my mind on the details before this session, and the thing that jumped out at me was this moment where you wrote about the Republicans’ decision to raze the Lincoln Memorial and build the Nathan Bedford Forrest mixed martial arts arena, and I think when I copyedited it just in October, that was a funny joke. Now it’s not so funny, actually. It’s a little like, Gosh, we’re living this now. Were you expecting that when you wrote it? Michael: Not in the least, Kirsten, and that’s pretty on the nose, all right. I’m kind of proud of having come up with that. Based on where it is in the book, I must have written that in the first half of 2023. This is describing an American Republican Party in the late 2040s. Nathan Bedford Forrest, of course, was a Confederate general, so they tear down the Lincoln Memorial, they decide to build something that they name after a Confederate general, and it’s a mixed martial arts arena. Of course at that point I had no idea that Donald Trump was going to be president again, let alone have the kind of celebration that he had the weekend of his birthday and building an MMA octagon on the White House grounds. So yeah, I nailed that one. Alex: I gotta say, he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t want to shift gears too much away from the politics, but there are a lot of funny cultural references. One of the things that stood out to me is you have a riff about the Beatles not existing in the post-world. I was wondering how you came across those. Were there just things that your own personal cultural interests would make you say, Would Paul McCartney exist in this alternate version of the 1960s? How did you come up with them? Michael: That was one of the most fun things about the book. I’ll give this much away. The people who go back to kill the infant Hitler botch the job and don’t succeed. However, he does not become the Adolf Hitler we all came to know and hate in history. His life takes a very different course, and he indeed becomes somebody else, so there being no Hitler, history changes a lot, and so I have some sections toward the end of the novel that talk about those changes, and that was probably the most fun part of it to write. I don’t want to give away too much of what happens and doesn’t happen, but there is no World War II, there is no Holocaust. Interestingly, in Stephen Fry’s novel, the Nazi Party found somebody who was even more diabolical and powerful and intoxicating than Hitler, so it became worse. In my version, the Hitler-less Nazi party is nothing, and Joseph Goebbels is a history professor and a writer of novels—he did, in fact, write novels in his life—and Goering ran a flying circus—he was still a World War I hero, as he was in real life, he’s still a World War I hero in the non-Hitler reality—but never became a Nazi. The Nazi Party existed but was a minor thing. So I had a lot of fun with stuff like that, and then, to get the Beatles in this reality, John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t meet on the fateful day, they met in July of 1957, they both separately formed bands. They met later as competing leaders of two local Liverpool bands, and they hated each other because they sensed prodigious talent in each other. So the Beatles never happened, and that had reverberations for Bob Dylan and for the rest of the culture, and it was just a ton of fun to write that stuff.Kirsten: I especially like the bit about—was it Paul McCartney’s brother being in the loo too long?Michael: Yeah, those kinds of details were just really fun to write. I’ll just add that there was a President Roosevelt in this non-Hitler reality, but he was a two-term president. Another American political figure becomes the dominant figure of the mid-twentieth century, and he was, in real life, in our reality, a senator, but somebody that very few people today have even heard of. I had fun with that too. Kirsten: I feel as though you had fun throwing in a lot of cultural references that are just your favorite things, like there’s a Casablanca moment.Michael: It’s just sort of unapologetically stuff that I like and I’m interested in and things like that, but there are also a number of jokes in there for people who know their history. You don’t even have to know that much history, you just have to know the basics of twentieth-century European history to get these jokes. There’s a point when my two time travelers encounter a police officer in 1889 Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they finish their conversation, and one of my two protagonists stops and turns around and says, I want you to remember a name, and the officer says yes, and he goes, The name is Princip, Gavrilo Princip, and if you’re still wearing that badge in 1914 you want to find an excuse to arrest him. I thought that was really funny, and I drop all kinds of things like that in there. Emily: In the profusion of references like these, but also for a lot of other things—the sprawling cast, the the madcap jaunts through history—I thought of Thomas Pynchon; Alex mentioned H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut. Would you think of the book as being in conversation with particular writers? Who are your influences? Michael: Those are apt, and I’m obviously quite flattered by them. H.G. Wells, for obvious reasons, is a point of comparison. I had a friend who said it’s very Pynchonesque in the way that it brings in all these different things. Alex: The name Darius Shrike is also very Pynchonesque.Michael: Yeah, I guess it is. Well, that’s cool. I’m glad to hear that. But yeah, the thing I’ve heard most often is Vonnegut. Kurt Andersen gave me a nice blurb, and he compared it to Vonnegut, and I have a friend who says he’s a big Vonnegut fan and told me that Killing Baby Hitler is as good as any Vonnegut, which I’ll take from him. That’s obviously really flattering. I read Vonnegut in high school and college, but it’s literally been that long, which is decades. I should go back and read Breakfast of Champions or something and see. I read three or four of his novels in those days, loved them. Was I conscious of Vonnegut while I was writing this? Not very. I thought it was kind of Vonnegutesque, but it’s been so long since I’ve read him that I really didn’t know. Alex: You mentioned reading Vonnegut in high school, and it also made me think that one of the things that jumped out to the book as well is that there are various personal moments, or not-quite-autobiographical ones. Like the sections in Morgantown, West Virginia, where you grew up, are very lovingly written. I was wondering if that was something that was conscious, were you just looking for settings that you were familiar with, or are there other bits of Tomasky autobiography sprinkled throughout for those who know? Michael: I think that’s the only bit that’s autobiographical. They say write what you know, and 90 percent of this novel is not that—I’m not German, I’ve never been to Munich, I wasn’t alive in 1889. I think I do a pretty serviceable job of evoking the smells and sounds of the nineteenth century, which are a lot grosser than you think, but obviously I wasn’t there, so I decided to, for those few pages, write what I know and put in something about a place that I know. Another protagonist is from Pittsburgh, which is just up the road from where I’m from. I’ve been to Pittsburgh a lot and I know Pittsburgh pretty well, but the rest of it is imagination. There are a lot of great novels where people write what they know, but I’m always a little bit more impressed as a reader when people write what they don’t know. It feels more adventurous to me. Alex: You mentioned the research. I was wondering what that was like, actually. I understood a lot of the World War II references, but then I was like, Oh, you’re not writing World War II. You’re writing nineteenth-century Austria, a place about which I know nothing. So what did you go through to flesh that out? Michael: Some Hitler biographies that talked about his youth and his upbringing, some books about the Habsburg Empire, and little specific things. There’s one thing in there involving a female character, Ulrike, who turns out to be an extremely important character in the book. When she’s introduced to readers, she’s sitting in a tavern reading a short tract by Nietzsche about Wagner. The casual reader of that paragraph could think I just made that all up, but I actually researched that. I was thrilled to find out that this pamphlet or short book that Nietzsche wrote was indeed published, I think, two years before the action in my novel is set. It’s entirely probable that this intellectual, bohemian, lefty young woman would be reading this book, in which Nietzsche denounces and announces his break from Wagner. It was indeed written just a year before Nietzsche went mad, so all that stuff’s true. I researched that, and I even read this book, which was really passionate and fascinating. I didn’t need to just to write this paragraph, but it was great. Kirsten: You’ve created a world that’s dystopian, that is extremely dark at times, and I was struck by your tone as a writer. You have a fluid tone, and you’re able to say things in a very casual way that are actually horrific. A lot of this world you describe, it’s described in a very offhand way. I particularly noticed that when you’re weaving climate change into this dystopia you’ve imagined, it really figures in a large way, in terms of shaping how society works, and in its effects on characters. At one point you make a joke in the Jaipur section about a well-loved cricketer who’s struck down by heat stroke and dies in the middle of a speech or something. It’s a funny line, but it’s also dark, and it reflects the reality we’re all staring down the barrel of: the way we’ve had to accept discussing these things in a very quotidian way. This is now the reality we have to tell our kids about. That’s all normal. How would you say that your awareness of climate change and maybe even the coverage we do at The New Republic has fed into this? Michael: I think we—led by Kate Aronoff, but a whole lot of other people too—do a really first-rate job on that topic, and I read our stuff, and I think about it, and it just struck me. I said, Well, if I’m creating a future world, I can’t ignore this, and it’s probably likely to be pretty bad, so let’s not sugarcoat it. But you’re right, I do try to present heavy things in a jokey way, just for the sake of the tone that I’m going for. I also try to do it not in terms of big pronouncements, but just little examples that make a reader go oh Christ. There’s one point where I say that alligators have migrated as far north as southern Illinois and grown to 30 feet. That’s like, Whoa, and another way of saying climate change has really had a massive impact on the world.Emily: There are so many ways that the book is so prescient, but one of them is in these robot companions that many of the characters have. Again, when you were writing this, people were not keeping AI girlfriends and boyfriends, as far as I know, but what do you make of how well you envisioned what was about to soon happen? Michael: I don’t know. I guess by the time 2141 actually rolls around—if it rolls around—things will be a lot freakier than I managed to portray in this novel, because it sounds like it’s all coming faster. One thing I ducked is this question of AI and how many people would be out of work. I did have one passage in there that said only about 30 percent—I forget the number, but only about 30 percent of the people had jobs anymore. But yeah, the robot assistants that people have—I don’t know, I was just trying to think of something science fiction-y, and I was thinking also in cinematic terms, and I could picture a person’s personal assistant—the word I came up with is filo. I don’t even remember why, but there’s some Greek root there that I forget, and you could picture people’s filos materializing and dematerializing and answering their questions, and being at their beck and call, and even in the case of at least one having intercourse with them. Alex: There’s another similar element as well, with one of the things is very prescient in the book: its conception of a far right that is globalized, which was a trend when you were starting to work on it; but especially as we’re talking this week, it’s like, Elon Musk encourages what are essentially pogroms in Belfast and in parts of the U.K. It’s one of the parts of the book that scared me the most. As I say this, also, it’s 99 degrees in New York, so climate change would be one of those things as well, but that was something that I was wondering—if this was a means for you to think through some of the ways that you’re thinking about politics right now. Michael: There’s a section—it’s not that long, maybe 12 pages or so—that discusses the breakup of the United States over the course of the mid-twenty-first century, and that’s something I’ve kind of thought a lot about. It seems to me like there’s decent odds that that’s going to happen. I’ve thought about how it might happen, and on what timetable, and what compromises people might have to make. To make a long story short, it doesn’t happen the way it happened in the 1860s, by these states going here and those states going there. It’s not geographically that simple in 2060 as it was in 1860. I’d like people to read it to see the details. The things that I describe the Republican Party of that period coming up with are pretty extreme, but also pretty plausible, and I’d also point out—in case any conservatives are actually watching this—that I don’t hold the left entirely blameless in what happens. There’s some, there’s some liberal shortsightedness in this story as well. Emily: Well, we have a final question for you, a very important final question: Michael, would you kill baby Hitler? Michael: I might do what my character did and chicken out, but I would certainly find a way to get him out of Braunau am Inn, which was his little hometown in Austria, right along the German border, and lead him to a to a different and better life. I just—I’m not sure I could. I thought about this a lot while I was writing it, and I might ask the three of you. I’m not sure I could kill an infant, even if I knew it was that infant.Alex: I would do it.Kirsten: You have a joke at one point about babies, which did make me laugh, where I think Harry’s trying to decide whether he wants to be involved in bringing up baby Hitler, and he says, I don’t think I want to. Not because it’s Hitler, but just because it’s a baby. Anyone who’s brought up babies can understand that. Alex: Well, thanks very much. Michael: Yeah. I’m really grateful to all of you. Not just for this—everyone should know that I asked a handful of friends and colleagues to read this in advance to see if there was anything that struck them as weird and that I needed to be careful about, and I’m grateful to all three for doing this, and Kirsten copyedited it into the bargain, and knows German, which really came in handy here. So thank you all a whole lot.

The new senior global affairs correspondent at CBS, Trevor Phillips, is also a pal of ex-UK ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was fired over his ties to Epstein. Plus: on Iran, MAGA hacks vs MAGA hawks.

The streamer lost out on Roku, but has its eye on Lionsgate.

If JD Vance was hoping for a light interview to highlight the release of his new book, he had another think coming: The hosts of The View did not pull any punches Tuesday while interrogating the vice president about his administration’s policy positions. “What did Black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?” asked host Whoopi Goldberg, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to remove Black history from American monuments and museums. “What exactly are you talking about, Whoopi?” Vance pressed, prompting loud groans from the audience. “It seems that it has been very easy for this administration to remove that, and to denigrate Black folks who have worked their behinds off to get this American dream,” Goldberg said. “So, that was actually a very helpful intervention because, I think the story you’re talking about is where you know, allegedly the administration is holding back the appointments of people based on skin color,” Vance said. “Well no. I’m talking about a host of things,” Sunny Hostin interjected. “I’m talking about Black history getting erased from public spaces, Black voter districts are being dismantled, Black leaders are being sidelined from our ranks. Where do Americans of color fit in this vision? Because it doesn’t seem like we fit.”Host Ana Navarro added that the Trump administration had allowed only 6,668 refugees into the country since October, and all but three were white South Africans. Vance denied Navarro’s number, claiming “everybody is welcome in our political coalition.” “So, you say we’re anti-minority or anti-Black—” Vance said.“No I didn’t say that. I asked, see?” Goldberg said. “Don’t start any stuff with me, man. Don’t get me in trouble!” The audience burst into cheers as Vance conceded. WHOOPI GOLDBERG: What did Black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?JD VANCE: What exactly are you talking about?AUDIENCE: *groans* pic.twitter.com/xFozfFCohk— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026The hosts of The View also pressed Vance over the economy. Host Joy Behar criticized the president for calling affordability a “hoax,” while spending millions of taxpayer dollars on his ballroom, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, an arch for himself, and a UFC-themed birthday party.Vance denied that Trump had called affordability a “hoax,” though he has many times, and argued that Trump had made “good progress” bringing prices down. “He just said he loves the inflation,” Navarro said, referring to Trump’s recent remark responding to surging inflation rates. “What he said, Ana, what he said is he loves the fact that the inflation is gonna come down when this war is over,” Vance said. “That’s what he said.”“That’s not what he said,” Goldberg interjected. “Are you his interpreter, or are you his vice president? Come on,” Joy Behar chided. The hosts laughed at the flailing vice president, who chuckled uncomfortably along with them. NAVARRO: Trump said he loves the inflationJD VANCE: What he said, Ana, is he loves the fact the inflation is going to come downWHOOPI: That's not what he saidBEHAR: Are you his interpreter, or his vice president? Come on pic.twitter.com/VNXTzb9NOv— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026At one point, Vance was brutally fact-checked after he brought up the claim that Trump had called all Mexicans rapists, saying that was a misconception. Instead, Vance argued that South American countries were off-loading criminals into our borders. “There have been many, many journalists, including CNN, where you used to work and be my colleague, that have tried to find evidence of that,” Navarro replied. “There is no evidence that [Nicolás] Maduro was releasing people from insane asylums or jails, like Fidel Castro did do. This was made up. And we just can’t, you know, accept it without pushing back.”Vance’s attempt to peddle his book on The View was a disaster—but honestly, it was entertaining.