Transcript - America This Week, August 22, 2025: "Is the New York Times a Government-in-Exile?"

From journalism icon to daily newsletter of an ousted micro-minority, the Times has taken quite a journey. Also, "That Hideous Strength," by CS Lewis

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America This Week. I am Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you doing?

Walter Kirn: Good. I’m out in the woods. You can see a little bit of woods over my shoulder there.

Matt Taibbi: I can.

Walter Kirn: Framed in the window. Yeah. There are the sounds of mooing cows because they’ve been let out onto the meadow in front of my cabin, so as to give us a tax write-off as an agricultural place.

Matt Taibbi: So you’re like a small scale version of Bass Pro Shop?

Walter Kirn: Exactly, yeah. And so also, there might be bears out. There’re preparing for their winter hibernation already, I mean, in August and it hasn’t snowed yet, but it could happen at any time.

Matt Taibbi: If there are any bears listening, Walter is unguarded in the house right now and the front door, it’s probably locked.

Walter Kirn: But there are new woodpecker holes in my house since I last was here. So as you know, they are world’s deadliest creature in terms of-

Matt Taibbi: And horniest.

Walter Kirn: ... in terms of siding. Yeah, and horniest.

Matt Taibbi: Right?

Walter Kirn: Exactly. They drill on your house in order to make sounds to attract mates from long distances.

Matt Taibbi: Who would do that? Make a lot of noise to attract attention from the opposite sex. It’s just unconscionable.

Walter Kirn: But I want to know what it is in American or human females that responds to whatever the equivalent is of pecking loudly. In other words, there’s something that they can’t, that human females can’t resist and we don’t know what it is, and I’m sure to woodpeckers, it seems just as irrational as woodpeckers do to us.

Matt Taibbi: But that’s true in every species. There’s that bird that makes pebble pyramids and whichever one builds the tallest one gets the girl.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, the grouse that do dances in little-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, the dancing. And in human beings, it’s just who’s the biggest douchebag, basically.

Walter Kirn: It’s driving a McLaren.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: It’s driving a McLaren.

Matt Taibbi: Wow. He’s a douchebag and he’s got a McLaren.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly.

Matt Taibbi: This is probably a good reproductive choice.

Walter Kirn: You see, the McLaren and the Porsche and the sports car were recent inventions, so it can’t be hardwired into females genetically to respond to them. The McLaren must evoke something from our deep past, and what could it be?

Matt Taibbi: Mustaches?

Walter Kirn: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Matt Taibbi: I don’t know. Does a McLaren go with a mustache? I don’t know. We’ll work this out off camera.

All right, so we had a lot of stuff happen this week. It wasn’t the rollicking, exploding news development that we’ve seen in recent weeks, although I’m reliably sure that there is stuff coming by the end of the week, so then we may be liars by the time the show comes out.

Walter Kirn: But that is a slight distortion. On Monday, we had every single European leader sitting in a semicircle around Donald Trump who was basically across between a Montessori teacher and the President of the United States. I think that the problem with the Trump years is that we don’t have relative graphs for news compared to non-Trump years.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right.

Walter Kirn: We had every European leader sitting around Joe Biden’s desk, I mean, it would’ve been a US postage stamp by now, but it was just another day in the life.

Matt Taibbi: It’s true. I guess I’m so laser focused on document releases at this point that the absence of them this week has been a little bit disappointing, but a lot of stuff happened and it’s stemming from ... It’s really one continuous narrative that goes back to Trump meeting Putin in Alaska that apparently not working out as well as they thought, or at least that was the narrative after it was over. There was an enormous amount of paranoia in which we’re going to get to in a moment.

And then there was a subsequent series of developments on the Ukraine score this week, and we are going to get to that, but we’re going to do it through an unusual lens, which is we’re going to ask the question. Is The New York Times America’s government in exile? It behaves like it. It represents itself as something like America’s government in exile, and its message is essentially your fealty is owed to our government and not theirs. I don’t know. Walter, would you have any preliminary thoughts about this before we get into some of the reasons why one might think this?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. They’re acting and behaving like they are, for sure. Across the board, they don’t only question the decisions, policies, comportment, style of the elected government. They are now at a point where they’re recommending reforms, even constitutional reforms that will, I think, give them a leg up, frankly. They are considering what could change about the government that would allow The New York Times to be more powerful than it is.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And they have a slight proposal that has just come out, a small one, nothing serious, but this was by David French this morning. If we could take a look. One sentence in the Constitution is causing America huge problems.

Walter Kirn: One little sentence.

Matt Taibbi: One little sentence. First of all, I love the illustration. The White House has a bouncy castle, but God are those phallic castles, right?

Walter Kirn: Dude, yeah. I’ve seen those in erotic gift stores, those pillars. I couldn’t decipher that. I’m glad you could tell that’s what it was. I really couldn’t.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it took a moment and I guess the bouncy castles are filled with helium and that’s why you need ropes to keep them on the ground. I mean, this is-

Walter Kirn: From floating away?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. This is a visual Thomas Friedman metaphor.

Walter Kirn: Like The Wizard of Oz.

Matt Taibbi: But essentially, the concept of this is that the one mistake in the Constitution. We love the Constitution and all, but-