Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction
In January 2026, WIRED reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun using Palantir’s AI tools to process public tip-line submissions. The system does not simply store or relay these reports. It processes English-language submissions, condensing them into what is called a “BLUF”—a “bottom line up front” summary that allows agents to quickly assess and prioritize cases.
Efficiency is the dominant framing as the system promises speed, clarity, and control over overwhelming volumes of information. Yet such efficiency depends on a prior reduction as expression is detached from the conditions of its articulation and reconstituted as data. In this form, listening no longer risks misunderstanding, it eliminates it.
Nor does this infrastructure operate in isolation. It relies on distributed participation in which listening is recast as vigilance. A recent ICE public X (Twitter) post encouraged residents to report “suspicious activity,” assuring them that doing so would make their communities safer.
The language is familiar, even reassuring. But it depends on a prior act of interpretation: that certain voices, presences, or behaviors are already legible as threat. Listening here becomes pre-classification—identifying danger in advance and acting on that identification as if it were already known. Rather than an isolated case, this development signals a broader transformation in how immigration and enforcement are governed. As legal and policy analyses increasingly note, artificial intelligence is becoming “one of the fundamental operating tools of policing,” deployed across domains ranging from speech and text analysis to risk assessment and document verification. Systems such as USCIS’s Evidence Classifier, which tags and prioritizes key documents within case files, and platforms like ImmigrationOS, which aggregate data across agencies to guide enforcement decisions, do not simply process information—they reorganize it. What matters is not only what is said, but whether it aligns—across time, across records, across bureaucratic expectations. Listening becomes continuous and anticipatory, oriented toward detecting inconsistency, deviation, and risk before any claim can be made or contested.
A very different narrative circulates alongside these developments. A recent BBC article suggested that AI chatbots can function as unusually “good listeners”—patient, nonjudgmental, even compassionate. Users describe these systems as offering space for reflection, sometimes preferring them to human interlocutors. Yet what is at work is not attention or relation, but pattern recognition trained to simulate understanding. Taken together, these examples reveal a shared transformation. Across both enforcement systems and everyday interaction, listening is increasingly detached from sensation, exposure, and accountability, becoming a process of extraction and classification rather than relation. As Dorothy Santos argues in her account of speech AI, machines do not simply assist human listening; they assume its position, becoming “the listeners to our sonic landscapes” while also acting as the capturers, surveyors, and documenters of our utterances. What follows from this shift is not just a change in who listens, but in what listening is. Listening no longer names an encounter between subjects; it describes a technical operation distributed across infrastructures that register, store, and act on sound without ever hearing it.
This shift is what I call “nonhuman listening.”
Nonhuman listening names both an infrastructural condition and a set of practices through which listening is reorganized as a technical operation. It describes a mode of perception distributed across systems that capture, process, and act on sound without exposure to it as experience, as well as the procedures—classification, ranking, prediction—through which sound is rendered actionable in advance. At stake is not simply the emergence of new technologies, but a reorganization of what listening has long been understood to do. Listening unfolds across thresholds of perception, attention, and care, shaped by what can be sensed, cultivated, or ignored. From its earliest formulations, it has been understood not as passive reception but as an ethically charged capacity. Aristotle’s distinction between akousis (hearing) and akroasis (listening) marks this divide, reserving listening for forms of attention capable of judgment and response. In this sense, listening has always named both openness and control: a posture of receptivity toward others and a way of organizing the world.
Nonhuman listening amplifies an older logic: not all voices are heard, and not all forms of speech register as meaning and listening does not begin from neutrality. Norms organize it in advance, determining what registers as signal, who gets to hear, and whose speech counts as intelligible. Meaning and noise do not inhere in sound itself; they emerge through historically sedimented expectations about voice, difference, and belonging.
Sound studies has long challenged the assumption that listening inherently connects or humanizes. Listening does not operate as an immediate or intimate relation; it relies on frameworks that precondition perception. Jonathan Sterne shows that claims about sonic immediacy function less as empirical truths than as ideological formations—narratives that naturalize particular social arrangements while obscuring how listening renders some forms of speech legible and others unintelligible. Listening does not simply receive the world—it organizes it.
At the same time, theoretical and experimental approaches foreground the instability of this organization. Voices do not exist as stable entities prior to their mediation; they “show up as real,” as Matt Rahaim writes, through specific practices and infrastructures that render them intelligible, contested, or indeterminate. Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualizes listening as resonance, emphasizing exposure—the possibility that listening might unsettle the subject—while also underscoring that such openness never distributes evenly. John Cage and Pauline Oliveros treat listening as a disciplined practice that requires cultivation and can fail as easily as it attunes. Listening is not given; it is trained.
Across these accounts, listening operates within regimes of power. Jacques Attali locates listening within governance, where institutions determine what can be heard, what must be silenced, and what becomes disposable. Trauma and memory studies intensify these stakes. Henry Greenspan shows that listening to testimony never occurs as a singular or sufficient act, and that extractive modes of attention can reproduce violence rather than alleviate it. Ralina L. Joseph’s concept of radical listening reframes listening as an ethical orientation—one that demands accountability to power, difference, and fatigue, and that attends to how speakers wish to be heard. As she writes, “the easiest way to refuse to listen is to keep talking.”
Taken together, these accounts point to a more difficult claim: listening is not simply uneven—it is directional. It can orient toward exposure and relation, or toward certainty and verification. When listening turns toward certainty, it no longer encounters speech as an address. It apprehends it in advance while certain voices register not as claims or appeals, but as warnings or threats.
Such orientation has precedents that are neither abstract nor metaphorical. During the 1937 Parsley Massacre, Dominican soldiers used pronunciation as a test of belonging. Suspected Haitians were asked to say the word perejil (parsley); those whose speech did not conform to expected phonetic norms were identified as foreign and often killed. Listening here did not register meaning or intent. It functioned as classification—reducing speech to a signal of difference and acting on that difference as if it were already known.
This logic persists in contemporary enforcement practices, albeit in different registers. Recent encounters with U.S. immigration agents reveal how accent continues to operate as a proxy for suspicion and a trigger for intervention. In multiple reported incidents, individuals have been stopped or detained and asked to account for their citizenship on the basis of how they sound: “Because of your accent,” one agent stated when asked to justify the demand for documentation . In another case, an agent explicitly linked auditory difference to disbelief, telling a driver, “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me,” before repeatedly questioning where he was born.
In these moments, listening again operates as pre-classification. Accent is not heard as variation, history, or movement, but as evidence—an audible marker of non-belonging that precedes and justifies further scrutiny. What is at stake is not mishearing, but a mode of listening trained to stabilize difference as risk. Speech becomes legible only insofar as it confirms or disrupts an already established expectation of who belongs.
Early analyses of digital surveillance anticipated a more radical transformation than they could yet fully name. Writing in 2014, Robin James identified an emerging “acousmatic” condition in which listening detaches from any identifiable listener and disperses across systems of data capture and analysis. The 2013 Snowden disclosures make clear that this shift was not theoretical but already operational. State surveillance had moved from targeted interception to total capture, amassing communications indiscriminately and deriving “suspicion” only after the fact, as a pattern extracted from within the dataset itself. Listening no longer responds to a known object; it produces the object it claims to detect. What registers as “suspicious” does not precede analysis but materializes through algorithmic filtering, where signal and noise become effects of the system’s design rather than properties of the world. Under these conditions, listening ceases to function as a sensory or interpretive act and instead operates as an infrastructural logic of sorting, ranking, and preemption. Contemporary platforms extend and normalize this logic. They do not hear sound; they process it, rendering it actionable without ever encountering it as experience.
The essays collected in this series extend this transformation across distinct but interconnected domains, tracing how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. Next week, Olga Zaitseva-Herz situates these dynamics within the context of digital warfare, where AI-generated voices, deepfakes, and synthetic media circulate as instruments of psychological manipulation, designed to provoke affective responses that travel faster than verification.
Contemporary speech technologies make this continuity visible at the level of language itself. As work in the Racial Bias in Speech AI series shows, particularly as Michelle Pfeifer demonstrates, speech technologies do not simply fail to recognize certain speakers; they formalize assumptions about what counts as intelligible language in the first place. In these systems, the voice is not encountered as expression but as input—something to be parsed, categorized, and aligned with existing datasets. When AI systems encounter African American Vernacular English—especially emergent idioms shaped by Black and queer communities—language is flattened into surface definitions, stripped of cultural grounding, or flagged as inappropriate. Speech is not heard as situated expressions; it is processed as deviation from an unmarked norm.
What emerges is a form of hostile listening: not the misrecognition of a human listener, but a condition in which recognition is structurally focused. Racialized language becomes perpetually at risk–mistrusted or excluded–not because it fails to communicate but because it exceeds the parameters through which the system can register meaning. Hate here is not expressive or intentional; it is procedural, embedded in the standards that determine what can be heard as language at all.
In this sense, the problem is not that listening has been replaced. It is that it continues—without exposure, without relation, without consequence for those who perform it. What appears as neutrality is the absence of risk. What appears as efficiency is the removal of encounters. Under these conditions, harm does not need to be spoken. It is heard into being in advance—stabilized as signal, confirmed as threat, and acted upon before it can be contested. The question that remains is not whether machines can learn to listen better. It is whether we can still recognize listening once it no longer requires us at all.
—
Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She earned her PhD in musicology with a minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota (2021) and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was the 2021–2022 Mandel Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Her research examines how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and contemporary politics. She has published in Sound Studies and Yuval, has forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Music and Politics. She is a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s (HEFNU) Virtual Speakers Bureau and has been an invited educator at two of its regional institutes, and is current editor of ISH’s public-facing blog. Her first book, Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, is in progress. Her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film, is a forthcoming teaching compendium that brings together key concepts in Holocaust studies with methods from film music and sound studies.
—
Series Icon designed by Alex Calovi
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer
“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens
Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari
Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso
Share this:
Impaulsive: Bro-casting Trump, Part I
But first. . .
An Introduction to Bro-casting Trump: A Year-long SO! Series by Andrew Salvati
“The Manosphere Won.”
That is how Wired succinctly described the results of the 2024 election the day after Americans went to the polls.
Among the several explanations offered for Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Kamala Harris, the magazine’s executive editor Brian Barrett argued, one surely had to acknowledge the crucial role played by that “amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly the drivers of the remaining online monoculture.”
Sure, there might be some validity in saying that Trump’s election had to do with inflation, with immigration policy, or with Joe Biden’s “doomed determination to have one last rodeo.” But his appearance on several popular male-centered podcasts in the months and weeks leading up to November 5 likely did much to mobilize support for his candidacy among their millions of viewers and listeners. Talking to Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Andrew Schulz, and Shawn Ryan “cement[ed Turmp’s] status as one of them, a sigma, a guy with clout, and the apex of a model of masculinity that prioritizes fame as a virtue unto itself,” Barrett wrote.
Indeed, during the president-elect’s victory speech, given in the early morning hours of the 6th, his longtime friend and ally Dana White, president of the UFC, took to the speaker’s lectern to acknowledge the contributions that these podcasters and their audiences had evidently made in elevating Trump to the presidency for the second time. “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” he said.
As a media strategy, this was something of an evolution of Trump’s approach in 2016, in which the former reality TV star had used Twitter to such great effect to bypass legacy media institutions and bring his unfiltered message directly to voters. This time around, and reportedly at the direction of his 18-year-old son Barron, Trump again leveraged the massive reach of new media platforms to speak directly to his target demographic of Gen-Z men.
But the strategy was also of a piece with Trump’s frequent assaults on the press, which he typically characterizes as the “enemy of the people.” Appearing in some of the friendlier precincts of the podosphere allowed Trump to skirt around mainstream journalists with their “nasty” questions and cumbersome norms of neutrality and objectivity, and to bask in the mutual admiration society that some of these interviews became. Indeed, as Maxwell Modell wrote in The Conversation not long after the election, podcasters, in contrast to professional journalists, “tend to opt for more of a friendly chat than aggressive questioning, using what research calls supportive interactional behavior … this ‘softball’ questioning can result in the host becoming an accomplice to the politicians’ positive self-presentation rather than an interrogator.”
Podcasts, in other words, provided Trump with a congenial space to self-mythologize, to ramble, and whitewash some of his more extreme views.
In total, Trump appeared on fourteen podcasts or video streams during his 2024 campaign (Forbes compiled a full list, including viewership numbers, which can be found here), which together earned a combined 90.9 million views on YouTube and on other video streaming platforms (it should be noted, first, that these are not unique views – there is likely an overlap between audiences; second, that these numbers do not include audio podcast listens, which, because of the decentralized nature of RSS, are notoriously difficult to pin down).
For her part, meanwhile, Kamala Harris also made the rounds on podcasts popular with women and Black listeners – key demographics for her campaign – including Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke, and Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay. It has been suggested, however, that the Harris camp’s failure (or perhaps unwillingness) to secure an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was a significant setback, and could have provided an opportunity to reach the young male demographic with whom she was struggling. In any event, while the counterfactual “what-if-she-had-done-the-show” will likely be debated for years to come, Rogan eventually endorsed Trump on November 4, throwing his considerable clout behind the once and future president.
While a comparison between Trump and Harris’s podcast strategy during the 2024 campaign would make for an interesting academic study, in the following series of posts, I will be particularly concerned with Trump’s success with the so-called podcast bros – partially because my own research interests are in the area of mediated masculinities, but also because they may have put him over the edge with a key demographic – with Gen-Z men.
Over the next few posts, I will examine several of Trump’s appearances on largely apolitical “bro” podcasts during the 2024 campaign season, including his interviews with Logan Paul, Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz, the Nelk Boys, and Joe Rogan. In the course of this examination, I will pay attention not only to what Trump said on these shows, but also to the way in which they established a sense of intimacy, and how that intimacy worked to underscore Trump’s reputation for authenticity. Along the way, I will also discuss the podcasts and podcasters themselves and attempt to locate them within the broader scope of the manosphere. Finally, given the passage of time since Trump’s appearances, I will consider to what extent, if any, individual hosts have become critical of his administration’s policies and actions – as Joe Rogan famously has.
Before I begin, however, I want to make a quick note about the sources: Following what is quickly becoming standard practice in the field, each of the “podcasts” that I analyze in this series has a video component, and in fact, may very well have been conceived of as a video-first project with audio-only feeds added as a supplement, or afterthought. For this series, though, my interest has centered on podcasting as a listening experience, and so the reader may assume that when I discuss this or that episode of Theo Von’s or Andrew Schulz’s podcast, I am referring specifically to the audio version of their shows. This is also why Trump’s interview with Adin Ross will not appear in this series – it was livestreamed on the video sharing platform Kick, and was subsequently posted to Ross’s YouTube channel (and thus is it technically not a podcast).
With that being said, let’s dig in. I will proceed chronologically, with Trump’s first podcast appearance on the boxer/professional wrestler Logan Paul’s show, Impaulsive, which dropped on June 13, 2024.
****
With about 13 minutes remaining in Logan Paul’s roughly hour-long interview with Donald Trump, the conversation turned to aliens. “UFOs, UAPs, the disclosure we’ve seen in Congress recently,” Paul explained, “it’s confusing and it’s upsetting to a lot of Americans, because something’s going, there’s something happening. There are unidentified aerial phenomena in the sky, we don’t know what they are. Do you?”
For his part, Trump responded gamely, and after respectfully listening to Paul, proceeded to tell a story about how, as president, he had spoken with Air Force pilots, “perfect people,” who weren’t “conspiratorial or crazy,” who claim that “they’ve seen things that you wouldn’t believe.” Still, Trump admitted that he had “never been convinced.”
I start with this turn in the conversation not necessarily to dismiss the 29-year-old Paul as a conspiratorial thinker or an unserious interviewer, but rather to highlight the overall tone of the Trump episode, which was overwhelmingly chummy and fawning. It was clear from their deferential posture that Paul and his co-host Mike Majlak were in awe of the former president, and asking such questions was a way of keeping it light and easy.
Logan Paul, after all, is not known for his incisive political commentary. Indeed, in the 17 episodes of Impaulsive that were released in the six months preceding the Trump interview (all of which I have listened to for this piece), political issues hardly featured at all. One exception came during the December 19, 2023 episode with his brother Jake Paul (also a professional boxer, who was recently knocked out in a fight against Anthony Joshua), in which Logan and Majlak discussed the prevalence of right-wing or MAGA content and signifiers as the inevitable backlash to the excesses of the left and the “woke mind disorder,” as Majlak put it. Another example was the January 31, 2024 episode with former co-hosts Mac Gallagher and Spencer Taylor, in which Majlak went on a self-described “rampage” about the problems at the U.S. southern border (in particular, he referenced the Shelby Park standoff, though without naming it), and in which Paul’s father, Greg Paul, got on the mic to declare his support for “Trump 2024.” But other than these incidental moments and superficial takes, the show is not really the place for nuanced discussions of public policy or electoral politics. (Indeed, in the January 31 episode, Paul even attempted to stop Majlak’s rant by noting that listeners didn’t really tune into the show for political discussion).
Nor does Impaulsive, despite all its testosterone-fueled bro-iness, seem to fit comfortably within the manosphere, as I understand that term and what it signifies. Indeed, though Paul and Majlak seem to have fixed ideas about gender and about the differences between men and women, absent from their discussions (at least during the six month sampling of episodes that I listened to) is the kind of misogynistic and reactionary “Red Pill” rhetoric that characterizes manosphere discourses.
This isn’t Andrew Tate, after all, and it’s important that we keep track of the distinction.
Impaulsive, rather, serves as a venue for Paul and Majlak to have informal, free-wheeling conversations with their guests – which have included fellow wrestlers, sports stars, internet personalities, rappers, pastors, and even Chris Hansen – on a range of other topics of interest to the hosts. If there is a throughline in all of this (aside from Paul and Majlak’s interest in how guests navigate their social media presence), it is certainly the relationship between the two co-hosts, their similar immature (we might more charitably say “goofy”) sense of humor, their mutual interest in combat sports, and their past history of online and offline hijinks all providing the basic framework for much of their conversation. It also gives Impaulsive listeners a sense of intimate connection with the pair, a sense that they are in the room as a silent participant in the hang.
And Paul has had a decade’s worth of experience in making comedic content. Having first earned a following by posting short videos on Vine as a college freshman in 2013, he dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a full-time career as a social media content creator. Fortunately for him, the gambit worked, and his content was soon reaching hundreds of thousands of followers across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in addition to Vine, and a compilation of his videos posted to YouTube amassed more than 4 million viewers in its first week. A number of TV and movie appearances followed, and in 2018, Paul began what would eventually become a professional boxing career with a white-collar match against the British influencer KSI.
Paul’s rise to notoriety wasn’t unmarked by controversy, however. In late December 2017, at a time when he had something like 15 million YouTube subscribers, Paul earned widespread condemnation for his insensitivity after he posted a video to the site showing the body of an apparent suicide victim in Japan’s infamous Aokigahara Forest, and making light of the situation. As a result of the backlash on social media – which included a Change.org petition urging YouTube to deplatform the creator that garnered over 700,000 signatures – Paul removed the video and issued an apology for his actions (this apology was itself criticized for being disingenuous and self-serving, and Paul was later compelled to issue another). For their part, YouTube took disciplinary measures against Paul, which included removing the creator’s channel from the Google Preferred advertising program, and removing him from the YouTube Red series Foursome, among other things.
But that wasn’t all. About a month later, YouTube announced that it would temporarily suspend advertisements on Paul’s channels (the revenue was estimated to be about a million dollars per month) due to a “recent pattern of behavior,” which, in addition to the Aokigahara Forest controversy, now included a tweet in which he claimed that he would swallow one Tide Pod for every retweet he received, and a video in which he tasered a dead rat. The suspension seemed to be little more than a slap on the wrist, however, and two weeks later, in late February of 2018, ads were restored on Paul’s channels.
The controversies continued after the launch of Impaulsive in November 2018. In an episode released the following January, as Paul and Majlak and their guest, Kelvin Peña (aka “Brother Nature”) were discussing their resolutions to have a “sober, vegan January” followed by a “Fatal February” (vodka and steaks), Paul chimed in and suggested that he and Majlak might do a “male only March.” “We’re going to go gay for just one month,” he announced. “For one month, and then swing … and then go back,” Majlak concurred. The implication that being gay was a choice drew sharp criticism online, including a tweet from the LGBTQ+ organization GLAAD, which pointed out, “That’s not how it works @LoganPaul.”
We could continue. But it’s also worth mentioning that in early 2019, Paul underwent a brain scan administered by Dr. Daniel G. Amen, which revealed that a history of repetitive head trauma from playing football in high school had damaged the part of his brain that is responsible for focus, planning, and empathy. Such a revelation may explain some of Paul’s poor decision-making. But it has also been suggested that this may be an excuse for the creator to not own up to his shortcomings. And the diagnosis hardly stopped him from starting a boxing career, which he freely admitted “is a sport that goes hand-to-hand with brain damage.”
But even while Paul’s head injuries may have, to some extent, affected his ability to form human connections, it hasn’t completely severed the possibility. On Impaulisve, Paul often shows a genuine curiosity about his guests, a desire to understand their perspectives, and displays a sense of esteem for those, like the WWE superstars Randy Orton and John Cena, whom he knows personally and professionally outside of the context of the podcast. Even amid the raucous Morning Zoo atmosphere of the show, Paul’s tone when speaking to his guests is usually deferential and flattering, and creates a space not only for sharing intimate revelations about, say, the challenges creators face while living so much of their lives in public (a common topic), but also allows guests an opportunity to present themselves and their work in the best possible light.
This kind of dynamic was at play during the Donald Trump interview, in which Paul and Majlak offered the former president plenty of opportunities to boast about the historic accomplishments of his first term and of his 2024 campaign, and to air his many grievances – against Joe Biden, the media, the Democratic Party, and the lawyers prosecuting the many cases against him. Impaulsive, in other words, became a platform for Trump to remediate his typical campaign rhetoric, a means of delivering familiar content in a way that privileged quiet intimacy rather than grandstanding performances.
This sense of intimacy derived, in large part, from the setting in which the episode was recorded: Paul and Majlak were sat close to Trump in a wood-paneled room at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But it also stemmed from the kinds of questions that the co-hosts asked Trump. At one point in particular, the conversation turned, as it often does on Impaulsive, to combat sports, and to Trump’s love of the UFC. Opening up on this non-political and heavily masculinized subject – and casually mentioning the cheers he receives when he attends UFC events in person – likely increased the former president’s appeal among Impaulisve listeners, who, according to Paul and Majlak, are mostly wrestling and UFC fans themselves.
Other questions about combat sports – like whether Paul’s brother Jake could win an upcoming fight with Mike Tyson – further cemented the sense that Trump was a fan among fans, and thus created conditions for what podcast researcher Alyn Euritt calls “recognition,” moments in which listeners may feel a sense of intimate connection with a speaker/host and with the larger listening audience.
But what stuck out to me when listening to the episode and thinking about intimacy and podcasting, was the way in which the calm and deliberate pacing of the conversation, with help from the co-host’s gentle guidance, largely prevented the former president from straying into the kind of stream-of-consciousness delivery that characterizes much of his public discourse, and which has come to be known as the Trump “weave.” Kept on course by a friendly interlocutor pitching softball questions, Trump can sound lucid, even rational – and one can see how, in listening to this, his supporters, and even those apolitical listeners in the Impaulsive audience, can get swept up and taken along for the ride.
This is perhaps true for those moments, which occur often, where Trump touts his own successes and popularity. At the beginning of the episode, for instance, after Trump gave Paul a shirt emblazoned with his famous mugshot (which Paul called “gangster” and said “it happened, and might as well monetize it”), the former president launched into a string of familiar complaints about how his prosecution in that case had been an “unfair” miscarriage of justice, and how it had nevertheless resulted in a fundraising boon for his campaign. “I don’t think there’s ever been that much money raised that quickly,” he declared. Uncritically accepted by the co-hosts – and even encouraged by their muffled chortling – such defiant but matter-of-fact posturing may have seemed reasonable to Impaulsive listeners, an understandable response to what was presented as a blatant act of political persecution.
But the apparent honesty and reasonableness of Trump’s views even seemed to extend to his inevitable criticisms of Joe Biden and the American news media, criticisms which were likewise encouraged by Paul and Majlak’s laughter. When Majlak, for instance, asked Trump whether he was “starting to come around or soften your views on some of the networks that you may have not gotten along with in the past?” Trump’s blunt response, “no, they’re fake news,” was met with legitimating chuckles, and with Paul’s concurring statement, “yeah, fake news.” It was Trump’s follow-up, however, in which he put special emphasis on his May 2023 town hall with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, that he elaborated his position, revealing that though he had thought the network had turned a corner in terms of its friendliness, or at least neutrality, toward him, they were instead “playing hardball.” Delivered almost in a tone of resignation, Trump seemed to give the impression that his poor (in his eyes) treatment by the press was a given, that their hostility, though unfair, was something that simply had to be endured. Again, this explanation, communicated in such an intimate conversational setting, seemed to suggest a cool and reasonable assessment of the situation and prepared listeners to later accept his more extreme view, expressed less than a minute later, that CNN was “the enemy.”
Overall, then, the episode, which ended with Paul, Majlak, and Trump filming a TikTok video in which the podcaster and presidential candidate squared off face-to-face as if shooting a fight promo, offered Trump a platform to connect with other combat sports fans, to burnish his reputation for authenticity, and to legitimize his many grievances. And while the number of new MAGA converts his appearance earned is an open question, what is clear is that Impaulsive afforded Trump an opportunity to directly speak to a demographic that was increasingly important to both campaigns.
—
Series Icon Image Adapted from Flickr User loSonoUnaFotoCamera CC BY-SA 2.0
Featured Image: Paul making his entrance as the WWE United States Champion at WrestleMania XL, CC BY-SA 2.0
—
Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere—Andrew Salvati
Robin Williams and the Shazbot Over the First Podcast–Andrew Salvati
“I am Thinking Of Your Voice”: Gender, Audio Compression, and a Cyberfeminist Theory of Oppression: Robin James
DIY Histories: Podcasting the Past: Andrew Salvati
Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
Gendered Sonic Violence, from the Waiting Room to the Locker Room–Rebecca Lentjes
Share this:
Current Top Posts
April 2021
January 2020
November 2019
October 2019
August 2019
April 2014
November 2017
March 2015
December 2017
October 2015
Sounding Out! 
Recent Comments