Slate’s Jacob Weisberg says Donald Trump is ‘a menace and a danger to democracy’
The chairman of the Slate Group says even if Trump loses in November, his legacy will be felt for years.
Amelia Krales for Recode
With a resumé that includes Newsweek, the New Yorker and 20 years at Slate, Jacob Weisberg has learned that journalists can’t go wrong by writing about “Topic A.”
“Trump is Topic A in a way no one in politics, in my lifetime, has ever been Topic A,” he said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka.
Weisberg is so obsessed with Trump that he built an entire podcast for Slate around him and his following, Trumpcast. He said he believes the impact of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will extend far into the future, even if he loses to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on November 8.
“I think this guy’s a menace and a danger to democracy, and I wanted that to be the premise of the show,” Weisberg said. “It’s going to take a long time to recover from this. America looks like a very different place, even if Trump loses but gets 45 percent of the vote.”
On the new podcast, he also discussed how Slate is expanding its podcasting efforts one year since it launched its podcast network Panoply. He also reflected on how much Slate has changed since it launched as a digital magazine in 1996, musing that media companies are taking a big risk if they become dependent on a platform like Facebook.
“Nobody is secure right now, and there’s a sense that high-quality publishers are losing power relative to Facebook,” Weisberg said. “It’s a vulnerable moment.”
One of Panoply’s other new podcasts is Revisionist History, hosted by the New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell. In case you missed our earlier interview between Gladwell and Peter Kafka, click here.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
