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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 16 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.Donald Trump has signed a deal with Iran to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We still haven’t seen the document, but all of the reporting suggests a very simple story: Trump lost. He got nothing of any significance. Trump himself plainly has no idea what happened, as he revealed in a strange ramble to reporters. But JD Vance does know what happened, even though he’s trying very hard to sugarcoat it in a pretty revealing way.We’re really lucky to be talking about all of this with Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who has a good piece arguing that Trump capitulated to Iran. Tom, great to have you on, man.Tom Nichols: Good to see you, Greg.Sargent: So let’s just sum up where we are. We haven’t seen the document, but all the reporting suggests that while the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, all that does is return us to where we were before Trump’s war. Meanwhile, they’ve punted the discussion over Iran’s nuclear program until later. And the Iranian regime has survived. So basically, Trump’s tens of billions of dollars in bombing didn’t compel Iran to do what he said he’d make them do. Tom, is that basically the size of things?Nichols: I think it’s worse than that. The bigger problem is that he counted on regime change. This was what the war was really about. So when that wasn’t going to happen, when it became clear a week or so in that this regime wasn’t going to collapse, this outcome, I think, was more or less inevitable.And the people that are now waiting and saying, Well, we need to see the details of this MOU. That’s fine. But even without knowing the details of the MOU, the Americans have been defeated here. And that pains me to say as an American. Because the regime is still intact, their nuclear material is still in their country. They’re actually politically more powerful now that they’ve flexed muscle and done some serious harm to the other Gulf states as a warning not to cooperate with the United States. There’s going to be some money going back into Iran, whether it comes through third parties or not.If you had said any of this to Donald Trump on the first night of the war, he would have said, That’s impossible, we’re going to get unconditional surrender. Well, we didn’t. And all of these things are going to happen. Without even knowing what’s in the MOU, you can know at least this much.Sargent: Right. Trump absolutely did expect unconditional surrender, even though he was told by lots and lots of different people within his administration, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that that wouldn’t happen. He was told that the strait would be closed by Iran and that that would exercise leverage over the global economy and over us. Trump couldn’t fathom that possibility because he’s strong. It’s just that simple, right? He’s strong, he wins, he’s a winner, so there’s no way that things won’t go exactly the way he says they will.Nichols: It’s bitten him before and caused him problems before, but there’s this weird quirk in Trump’s personality where he really believes that saying things makes them real. That, like a child, he can sort of wish-cast things into existence. And you can play that game with domestic politics and tariffs and taxes and do some fancy dancing around where the money is in terms of things like revenue. You can bully other Republicans to agree with you. What you can’t do is do that with a war where the enemy gets a vote.Every day that Trump said they’re eager to make a deal, there’s going to be a deal, a deal is imminent—the Iranians are not Republican House members. They are a foreign country and an enemy of the United States. And there’s nothing to stop them from saying, No, there is no deal. And now that we have one, it’s not great. It’s basically an acknowledgment that the United States failed to gain any of its strategic objectives.Sargent: That seems beyond clear. So Trump talked to the media about his deal today. He blasted Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which unfroze tens of billions of dollars that Iran could then access in foreign accounts. Listen to Trump.Donald Trump (voiceover): It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars was given to Iran. It was a deal where $1.7 billion in cash was put on a Boeing 7—well, not a 757, I guess, right? But on a big, beautiful Boeing 757. They needed a Boeing 747, to be honest with you, because it was a lot of cash. $1.7 billion was taken out of the banks and given to Iran. And on top of that, tens of billions of dollars was spent. So they tried to bribe them to make a deal and that didn’t work. It never works.Tom, as far as we know now, Iran will also be able to access a huge tranche of funds under Trump’s deal too. Can you explain that? How do you respond to what Trump said there?Nichols: Well, I was a critic of the JCPOA because I didn’t like how much of it was front-loaded. But I also have to be honest and say that in the years that followed, the deal seemed more or less to work. Now Trump has wandered into a crappier version of the JCPOA, starting all over again, with the argument that they’ll get access to this money if they clear certain gates and engage in certain things. And the Iranians are just better at this than he is. I think that money is going to start coming to them again through third parties.That’s why you keep hearing Trump and Vance both being careful to say, Well, we’re not just going to give them cash. No, you’re going to open up the ability to have cash get to them with your OK. And I suspect that once people are tired of this whole process, which will be very soon, and once Trump is no longer paying any attention to it, the Iranians are going to get what they want. How soon, how much—that’s just a matter of working out the details.Remember, in the end, this was supposed to be giving the Iranian government back to its people, who would then dismantle the nuclear program, end support for terrorism, restrain their proxies, blah, blah, blah. None of that’s going to happen. They’re going to get the money one way or another.Sargent: What’s the basic difference between what Obama did with the money and what Trump is doing with the money? Do we know?Nichols: Well, without seeing the MOU, hard to say. But I would say that Obama did it without completely disrupting the international economy, blowing billions of dollars’ worth of expensive American weapons, getting some Americans killed, getting many hundreds more wounded, and then weakening the United States by forcing us to basically admit that, yes, the Iranians own the Strait of Hormuz.Sargent: Right. The bottom line here is that Trump is in some sense using the mechanism Obama used, which is a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Obama did this through negotiation. Trump did it through spending tens of billions of dollars committing massive war crimes, bombing an Iranian school filled with children, et cetera, to practically melting down the global economy. That’s the difference. They’re using more or less the same mechanism.Nichols: Trump blew up a lot of things, expended a lot of weapons, messed up the global economy, and now is doing it exactly the way Obama did it. And we’ll probably not get as good a deal, because now the Iranians have made sure to do things like booby-trap the uranium. Even if international inspectors get in there—and whatever Pete Hegseth says, you’re not going to have Marines in there digging this stuff out—getting inspectors in there is going to be a lot trickier than it was 10 years ago. It was just stupid and pointless.Sargent: I think there’s actually another reason for that that I want to get to in a second. But first, let’s listen to JD Vance for a second. There’s a bit of confusion about how Iran will get access to this money. It’s being described as $300 billion. JD Vance was asked about this. Listen to this.Reporter (voiceover): The Iranians are saying that they’re going to have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?JD Vance (voiceover): Well, that’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you’re going to see, Ed, and people have to be skeptical of this, is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits. So we absolutely are open to the Gulf Coast countries investing in the reconstruction of Iran, but only if Iran ends their nuclear program, ends their enriched stockpile of material, and is really open to an inspections and enforcement regime that gives the American people confidence they’re never going to have a nuclear weapon.Sargent: So if I understand this correctly, the U.S. will allow Iran to get access to this money if and only if Iran agrees to some kind of binding long-term constraint on its nuclear program. What you’re saying is that once the nuts and bolts really hit, when they really start to talk about this, probably Iran will be able to get access to that money fairly quickly, or at least before any final commitment is made. And when JD Vance says this money will come from other Gulf Coast countries investing, what’s he referring to there? And what’s your overall reaction to what you heard from JD?Nichols: Well, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get it. This is where I will be cautious and say that until we see this MOU—which for some reason the administration really doesn’t want to release to the public, which should tell you something right there—I don’t know how quickly it’ll get here. But basically, we’re committing to supporting the reconstruction of the country we just blew to smithereens after getting nothing.It really is staggering to have the administration claiming, We finally got a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. Look, I was never in favor of attacking Iran, but I was a real hawk on the issue of, if they ever get close to a nuclear weapon, that could actually be the trigger for war. But there was no evidence of this, and there’s been no evidence of it for 10 years, since the JCPOA.So again, we’re back to this problem that they’re going to get a lot of money, they’re going to get reconstruction support from the Gulf states that they have pounded and inflicted punishment on for cooperating with us. How does this not leave Iran—even though Iran is temporarily militarily weakened—in a strategically more powerful stance?That’s why, when you listen to that part we just listened to, Greg—where you ask JD Vance these questions and he does the Jackie Gleason thing, where he’s trying to explain his way out of it—the reality is Trump wants out. And he’s willing to buy his way out if he couldn’t bomb his way out.Sargent: Right. Obama actually ended up getting more because he had an actual deal that laid out what oversight of the Iranian nuclear program would look like. Trump doesn’t have that. He’s just now doing what Obama did, which is using money to try to get it. Nichols: And doing it without the support of the international community. Sargent: And after spending tens and tens of billions of dollars committing war crimes, destroying the global economy—Nichols: I’m not there yet on war crimes. I think that waits for an investigation. But he started a preventive war. He started a war of choice, which itself is horrific, because this didn’t even have the rationale of the Iraq War behind it. I said at the beginning of this, the Iraq War looks like it was competently lawyered up compared to this. Bush went to the United Nations, he had allies on board with at least some of it. He made a case, he put a clock on it about the inspectors. This was Trump just getting up one morning and saying, you know what, it’s time to take out Iran.Which itself is a problem when you’re talking about war crimes and crimes against humanity. But in the end, I will also say that had he toppled this regime, Greg, I would have been one of the people shrugging and saying, Well, you have to congratulate him if he managed to get rid of one of the worst, most dangerous regimes on this planet. I may not have liked the way he went into it, but I would have had to certainly congratulate him on coming out of it. Now he’s gotten the worst of all worlds. He’s taken America on a discretionary war, didn’t get what he wants. He’s going to have to pay off the bad guys so that he can get out of this. And basically he’s going to paper over his own mistake here with dollars. That’s what he’s going to do.Sargent: I think that’s basically the size of it. I just want to say one more thing about JD Vance’s strange ramble there. He’s basically admitting that Trump is using the same mechanism that Obama used—a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Doesn’t JD just end up making Trump look like a complete moron, given that it comes right after Trump compared his deal favorably to Obama’s unfreezing of funds to Iran?Nichols: No part of this administration communicates within itself. And what we’re seeing here—given the concerns about Trump’s health, his state of mind—JD Vance’s answer was sort of stumbling and bumbling, but within the normal range of political dissembling, if that makes any sense.Trump, I think, just doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. That’s the bigger worry—that Rubio and Witkoff and Kushner are saying, OK, we’ve got it, but I don’t get the sense that Trump himself really understands anything that’s going on here. The idea that Trump and Vance aren’t on the same page isn’t surprising at all. I really wonder how much Trump understands any of this at this point.Sargent: So Tom, I just want to close on a point you make in your piece, which is really interesting. Trump is threatening to restart hostilities against Iran if it doesn’t agree to surrender its nuclear program. You point out that Iran just won’t believe that, because Trump has shown that he wanted an exit from all this. I want to add to your point and get you to talk about this. As we get closer to the midterms, it becomes next to impossible for Trump to restart military action of any kind, let alone using any kind of ground invasion. Republicans will just not allow that to happen because it’ll utterly crush them in the midterms.So I think, Tom, what Trump has really done here is lock in a time frame that actually weakens his leverage over Iran over time. It weakens his leverage over Iran’s nuclear program over time. And Iran knows that. Am I right?Nichols: I think so. And he’s also alluded to using a nuclear weapon at one point. He said, We still have the ultimate, you know. But I just find it hard to believe—although with this administration and this president you never know—that right after Labor Day, as everybody’s going into the midterms and he’s still trying to wait for good news on the economy … remember, what he really cares about is international markets. He’s going to say we’re starting up the war again? On what pretext? And by that time, he really will have to go to Congress or do something.He surprised the country and the American people and the world by doing this when he did it. I don’t think you can go to that well twice. And I could be wrong—I just don’t believe him when he says, Well, if this doesn’t work out and they don’t behave, I’ll just start up the war again. That means he’s willing to tie down huge numbers of U.S. forces halfway around the world on a maybe while negotiators negotiate. At some point, ships have to come home. Soldiers and sailors need to be cycled through so they can do the things they need to do. They can’t just sit on ships for three or four months. I just don’t buy it.Sargent: So just to boil this down, we’re now entering the really hard part, which is the part where we negotiate over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and the nuts and bolts of that have to be worked out. And Trump has weakened his leverage going into that. And Trump has also strengthened Iranian leverage because Iran knows it can hold the global economy hostage now. Is that the size of it?Nichols: Right. And the Iranians get to appear like the aggrieved party now that they’re the ones that have lost thousands of people and been attacked. And even with a competent team that understood the issues and knows what it’s doing, trying to negotiate a nuclear program after you’ve bombed it and put it under a lot of rubble takes a long time. It’s going to take even longer here.So the idea that somehow in 60 days, sometime again around Labor Day or something, Trump’s going to say, That’s it, everything’s fixed, we’ve got it—none of that’s going to happen. This is going to be a long cold war with the Iranians, just like the one we’ve been in with them for 47 years. And Trump made it worse. So I don’t see any way out of this in a way that enhances American security anytime soon.Sargent: Utter catastrophe all around. Tom Nichols, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.

There is a nonzero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital, Tirana, to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”In addition to halting the developments on Zvërnec and on Sazan Island, protests are demanding the resignation of Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama, who’s been in power since 2013. Demonstrators have also targeted opposition leader and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha. A member of the Democratic Party, Berisha was until last November under house arrest as a result of corruption charges. “It’s called the Socialist Party of Albania,” Hasa clarified of Rama’s party, “but has nothing to do with socialism.” Both he and Berisha have been supportive of the developments in question as they look to cozy up to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as a means of endearing themselves to the U.S. president. Last week, the Trump administration lifted restrictions against Berisha imposed by the Biden administration.Rama has played a more active role. He had a chance dinner meeting with Ivanka Trump and Kushner in southern Albania. Months later, the president’s son-in-law approached him in Davos about investing in his country’s coastline. Rama has championed the project ever since. Just before Trump’s inauguration, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners—a firm linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners—the status of a “strategic investor.” The Narta Lagoon resort is slated to be officially developed by the Netherlands-registered Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, an offshore trust that reports have linked to Kushner, Qatari billionaires, and a string of questionable characters.  The Sazan Island project is being led by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. A P.R. agency for that development told Al Jazeera that any investors involved in it were acting “in a personal capacity.” The strategic investor designation entitles Atlantic Incubation Partners to expedited approvals, and the Zvërnec project was officially approved to begin construction in January 2025. Demonstrations began locally at the end of May. On May 30, footage showed private guards for Albanian oligarch Shefqet Kastrati—who’s reportedly been working closely with Kushner—beating up activists protesting around the fence protecting the site of the slated development. The images only further inflamed Albanians, and protests spread rapidly.Since then, the protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s Communist government in 1991. Protesters’ demands reflect their long-running frustrations. Besides seeking Rama’s resignation, the Flamingo Revolution is demanding the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers. It’s further demanding the withdrawal of a recent initiative to offer generous tax breaks and special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas. Protesters are also trying to reverse recent amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage, which they argue have streamlined investors’ ability to build on and near important environmental and cultural sites. “This project broke the camel’s back,” Hasa said. Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends.”Understanding why Kushner’s seaside ambitions have kicked off an uprising in Albania requires a look back at the country’s tumultuous last century. Albania was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism. The country’s increasing isolation—from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China—led to mounting economic difficulties in the lead-up to Hoxha’s death and the ensuing collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Like many other formerly socialist countries in the 1990s, Albania underwent a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism marked by graft, speculation, and—in Albania’s case—disastrous pyramid schemes. Among the most enduring legacies of that period is a controversial 1991 land-reform law meant to redistribute property that had been collectivized under Hoxha. The result has been decades of ownership disputes, including in coastal areas that stand to become more valuable as the country continues to court foreign tourists to its sandy beaches and lush pine forests. Residents claiming land—and without the resources to fight for those claims in lengthy court processes—have been forced to give up their parcels and move away. Conversely, enterprising developers with more cash, including foreign investors and organized crime syndicates enriched by transition-era graft, can falsify documents and contest locals’ ownership claims. These legal gray areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers; as Rama once bragged to prospective Italian investors, “Fortunately, here we have no trade unions.” Last week, the Democratic Party expressed support for the protests as means of confronting government corruption, and introduced legislation aligning with several of the protesters’ demands. Demonstrators, however, have continued to call for Berisha to be thrown in jail, and to express frustration with the two parties that have dominated Albanian politics and economic development since the 1990s. In recent years, smaller parties have sprouted up in an attempt to pose alternatives. Redi Muçi was elected to Parliament last year, as a member of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë—the Together Movement, in English. The party formed out of student protests that were violently repressed by Berisha’s government in 2011, and another wave of demonstrations against educational reforms in 2018 and 2019. As Muçi points out, popular frustrations with both Rama and Berishi have been fueled by rampant corruption and the rising cost of living in one of Europe’s poorest countries. “Practically the whole Albanian economy has been directed toward the construction industry and tourism,” he told me. “The fuel that pushes this through is money laundering from drug traffickers. What has been happening along the Albanian coastline, but also in the capital city and elsewhere, is money coming from investors that hide behind shell companies that pour huge sums of money into the country through the construction, and which has made the city of Tirana an unlivable place” as public spaces are turned into enormous private developments backed by shady investors who drive up property prices through speculation. In rural areas, especially, he added, there are “investors who come from God knows where to build these huge resorts, destroying nature and ecosystems and habitats, as well as taking away property rights for local communities.”A bipartisan push to turn Albania into a prime destination for real estate investment has seen rents skyrocket as foreign investors snap up properties for short-term rentals and glorified safety-deposit boxes, making housing prices “utterly unaffordable” for ordinary renters, Muçi said. A report from the nongovernmental organization Transform Europe found that the average price per square meter of housing in Tirana reached approximately $1,700. The average salary was less than $800; housing prices that year grew more than twice as much as wages. The combination of rising costs and low purchasing power has made Albania’s capital more expensive than Rome and Barcelona. A significant part of that, the report adds, is likely the result of money laundering: 32 percent of homes sold in 2021 were acquired by nonresidents. As of 2023, 33 percent of Albanian residencies—and more than 17 percent in Tirana—remained unoccupied.While rising tourism has been a boon to the country’s economy in aggregate, the jobs created in the tourist sector tend to be poorly paid and vulnerable to exploitation. Migrant workers making just 700 euros (around $812) a month for grueling 12-hour days in restaurants and hotels have had their passports confiscated by employers as soon as they land in Albania. Lëvizja Bashkë is pushing for the state to direct investment toward more productive sectors that can create year-round, broader-based economic opportunities and prevent the rapid emigration of young Albanians seeking better-paid job prospects abroad. Protests may already be bearing fruit. Politico noted still unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multibillion-dollar resort project. That may not stop the demonstrators. Rama seems worried. The European Commission warned his government to “act without delay” to stop any prospective violations of the bloc’s environmental rules—or endanger Albania’s bid for EU membership. Under mounting pressure, Rama has accused protests of being the product of foreign meddling by “enemies of Israel and Albania,” and complained that marches were causing tourists to cancel their reservations to visit the country. The image of nefarious foreign actors sowing chaos bears little resemblance to the images being broadcast from the streets of Tirana and elsewhere, of peaceful parades with areas for kids to sit and draw. “You have grassroots left-wing movements, LGBTQ+ activists, environmental movements, representatives of all four major religious communities, and conservatives,” Hasa said. “You even have individuals who are right-wing, or a little bit far right.” Muçi agreed. “In such big numbers, you have people there from all walks of life, beliefs, and ideologies,” he told me. What unites them, he said, “is this call for a new Albania—for a different kind of politics that is not the one represented by Rama and Berisha.” It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note. 

The alt-comedy-to-auteur-pipeline keeps pumping away: Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Bo Burnham, and now John Early. The 38-year-old stand-up and sketch-scene staple is familiar to millions for his handpicked cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Antihero,” and is deeply beloved by fans of the pitch-black, premium-cable cult series Search Party, in which he played a callow, sociopathic influencer who faked lymphoma for clicks, among other things. “Oh my God, I would never lie about abuse,” says his character, Elliott Goss. “And I lied about cancer.” The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for self-destruction.Early speaks a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  The first time we see Maddie—played by Early wearing a blonde wig and prosthetic breasts—she’s bouncing her way through sunny Los Feliz to what sounds like a synth-thetic cover of Hot Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” The risks here are real, and they’re spectacular; like much else in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s performance—all fluttering eyelids, wan smiles, deep-chested breaths and a mild vocal fry seemingly derived from the Aaron Spelling Televisual Universe—is suspended between deadpan rigor and earnest expressivity. To paraphrase Sontag on camp, Maddie is very much “a woman” in quotes, but she’s also an intrepid, endearing, and desirable heroine whose talent is emphasized alongside her decency, and whose pain is never played for laughs. Early’s decision to cast himself—inspired by the legendary drag queen Harris Glenn Milstead—feels like an unveiling of aspirations and influences from the bad-taste extravaganzas of John Waters to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls to the postmodern brinkmanship of Todd Haynes, whose shadow falls over Maddie’s Secret and then some. Todd Haynes’s controversial 16 mm short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) used a series of strategically carved Barbie dolls to dramatize the singer’s battles with anorexia. The film’s miniaturized melodrama style invited pearl clutching while winning critical plaudits. Haynes was inveighing against the kind of prime-time docudrama dreck that sought to reduce artists and celebrities to their afflictions. Maddie’s Secret isn’t as stark or as confrontational as Superstar, but it’s obviously a spiritual descendant of sorts, adopting a hyper-specific form for the express purpose of demolishing it. Early’s mash-up of allusions and straight-up see-what-sticks goofiness is novel, like a bold combination of Haynes (whose critically acclaimed movies are often very funny) and the deadpan alt-comedy pastiche master David Wain, venerated by creators of Early’s generation for superbly skewering glossy, popular genres like summer-camp sex farces or big-city rom-coms. (A corny portmanteau for those in the know: Wet Hot May December.) But Early isn’t simply cracking in-jokes; instead, he’s inviting fellow campers and normies alike to revel on his particular, slippery wavelength.   “I swear to God, Maddie, it’s like you’re out of some modern-day fairy tale,” says Deena (Kate Berlant) to her work bestie as they clock in for dishwashing shifts at the premium cooking brand GourMaybe. The avidity of the line reading is amusing in and of itself while establishing the very real—and inherently perilous—happily-ever-after stakes of the narrative to come. Like most princesses, Maddie is a bit oblivious: She can’t tell, for instance, that Deena regards her as her own personal thirst trap, an infatuation that manifests in increasingly aggro-platonic postures. The more that butch lesbian Deena brags about her other sexual conquests, the clearer it is she wants to stick her tongue down her hetero pal’s throat—a shameless genre cliché that Early and Berlant take giddy pleasure in pushing to the breaking point. The pair have been working together for more than a decade now in shorts and sketches, and their chemistry is positively pharmaceutical; Berlant, who’s got a touch of wild genius, weaponizes her lanky limbs and angular jawline every time she walks into frame, as if Deena were trying to puncture the invisible bubble of the friend zone with her body.Deena is transparently jealous of Maddie’s sweetly and sweatily ursine husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), the main beneficiary of his love’s off-the-clock cooking talents. “Did you throw away the mango pickle from the Indian we ordered?” Maggie asks after sashaying home, one of many delectable lines that turn the low-hanging fruit of TV-movie dialogue into gourmet fare. Another one, after Jake gently suggests uploading footage of Maddie’s culinary skills to the cloud: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m in postproduction.”Maddie won’t cook or eat meat, because of a childhood trauma around food and body image. “The camera adds ten pounds,” chides Maddie’s mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), when her daughter calls her to talk about the possibility of her becoming a brand ambassador for her company—a “Gourmaybe Girl.” Early’s stricken reaction shot on the other end of the phone—blue-hued in the moonlight, and held for an extra beat beneath a tinkling piano score—perches firmly at the precipice of winking excess without tipping over. Every aspect of the film exhibits this level of discipline, from the writing and directing and acting to the mise-en-scène; the wonderfully stylized cinematography is by Max Lakner, who keeps floridly color-coding the characters’ psychological states. We get blood reds and deeper purples; enveloping shadows and ring-light halos; ghostly window reflections and heart-to-hearts. The food that Maddie prepares looks variously appetizing and ersatz depending on whether we’re in her home kitchen or at the fluorescent Gourmaybe offices. There are plenty of less stridently artificial movies that could benefit from a small fraction of such expressivity.As the plot develops, Early includes all kinds of superfluous shtick, like interludes in a queer-dance group that are basically an excuse for cast frolicking on the clock. Still, he keeps an admirably tight handle on the various character dynamics, including Jake’s yearning to become a father, a plan held in check by Maddie’s mommy issues. Crucially, Early refuses to trivialize Maddie’s recovery in the hospital scenes, even as he populates the ward with killer supporting performers like Vanessa Bayer and Leah Hennessey. Sad moments are played straight, despite the absurdist flourishes around them, as when another patient, Connie (Hennessey), eulogizes a fellow patient who didn’t make it: “Your existence was inconvenient to me because you were the living embodiment of the parts of myself I’ve tried to obliterate.” Simple tear-jerking is easy, but the articulation of genuine angst—especially in this context—takes real sensitivity and nerve. For anyone who might still be disoriented by the way Maddie’s Secret plays with tone, the eulogy sequence wipes the smirk off the movie’s face—or their own—once and for all. The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected.Early’s softheartedness is winning, but he’s hardly edgeless. Besides working through his nostalgic ambivalence for the shock tactics of Kate’s Secret and its ilk, he’s taking aim at the lifestyle-brand fakery of GourMaybe and its craven head honcho, Zach (Connor O’Malley), who addresses his staff megalomaniacally, like a true believer. “Play nice, we’ve got content to make,” he bellows, with O’Malley torquing his delivery as if he knows the line is destined for future screencap-meme status. It’s telling that a comedian like Early, who developed his skills and following in an extremely online setting, would cast the internet in such ambivalent terms; crucially, Maddie’s catharsis bypasses the zone of public performance altogether. The question of whether Maddie will get another chance to be famous for her cooking is one of several loose ends that Early leaves conspicuously dangling; others include the fate of her marriage to Jake (Rahill is given plenty of directorial leeway in a part with more bruised dignity than expected) and Deena’s mental health (Berlant is intrepid enough to survive being the only member of the cast treated in the end like a cartoon character; the movie loses a bit of spark when she’s sidelined in the home stretch).The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending is in sync with its TV-movie inspirations, but it also underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected; to swap out a benign, crowd-pleasing sort of cognitive dissonance for a sometimes disorienting ambiguity. Maddie doesn’t hold onto all of her secrets—she can’t—but she’s still finally a woman of mystery. The highest compliment that Early can be paid is that even when the movie ends, Maddie seems to exist beyond the final (freeze) frame.