Opinion | Trump’s Plan: Skip the Debates, Win Iowa, Avoid Prison

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I would love to just hear one word from all of you. What’s one word that sums up how you felt about this debate?

Bemusement.

Hmm.

Amusement.

Wow.

That’s a rip off. Come on. Come on.

Carlos?

Darkness.

Darkness. Darkness.

Darkness.

So I’m going to, for once, break the rules. As everybody who is a faithful reader of my column knows, I’m a big fan of the Indigo Girls. And I have not one word, but I have a lyric from an Indigo Girls song. And it is, “No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom.” That’s how I felt about watching this.

That kind of fits with darkness — doom.

At one point in the debate, I believe Mike Pence said something like, God is not finished with the United States of America. And one of my Catholic friends on Twitter tweeted, yes, there’s much more chastisement and punishment to come.

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From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lydia Polgreen.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

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So I watched the GOP debate last night. I know you all watched the GOP debate last night. Did any of you watch the interview with Trump?

Portions.

I did not watch the Trump interview.

I went back and read the transcript, which was actually a mistake because it’s terrifying and seems even weirder when you’re not watching it.

What’s terrifying about it?

Listen, we’re going to come back to Trump. But first, there were eight candidates on stage last night. There was a lot of words said. But did any of you feel like we got a better sense of where we are in terms of this stated desire to — that the American people seem to be telling us to find a post-Trump candidate? Are we any closer to that?

I mean, it certainly didn’t look like it from the debate. I mean, the audience was clearly more into Trump than anyone else as well. But there was no breakout performance. There’s this kind of aimlessness that you see, except maybe from Vivek Ramaswamy, who basically is running as a younger Trump and maybe the most obnoxious candidate ever to grace a debate stage. So I did not come out of it thinking, yes, yes, everybody can rally around this option.

I mean, I think it was a good illustration of the dilemmas of Republicans who want to move beyond Trump. And actually, I thought at various points it gave you a pretty clear sense of the core divisions in the party, which was helped out by the fact that, more than I think I realized or expected, all of the old-guard candidates despise Ramaswamy, to the point where I started out thinking, OK, there’s an interesting strategy here.

Everyone thought there was going to be a pile on against Ron DeSantis with people trying to knock him out of the second place position. But instead, there was a pile on against Ramaswamy. And I went from thinking that it was strategic to thinking that it was just this sort of deep, visceral hatred. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Oh, yeah. Nikki Haley, clearly.

I thought the most telling moment in the debate was when Ramaswamy started talking about America being depressed and mental health problems and people not having a national narrative anymore. And Pence swoops in and says, there’s nothing — I’m paraphrasing — but there’s nothing wrong with the American people. The only thing wrong is Washington, DC, and so on.

And I mean, right there, that’s the sort of pre-Trump/post-Trump divide in the Republican Party. Like, is America a great country that happens to have been taken over by some incompetent liberals, unfortunately? Or is America — are we living through American carnage?

The problem is, how do you bridge those two worldviews? It’s not very easy to do.

That’s what I meant a little bit when I said that the overwhelming theme for me was darkness.

Darkness.

Even though, I must say, Lydia, you cheated. You asked us for one word, and then you gave many, many words.

Yeah, Lydia, that was a classic —

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Yeah. Although I should say that song you quoted is — from a fellow Indigo Girls fan — is “Prince of Darkness”—

Indeed it is.

— which could be thematic to the gloom and doom of the debate. So I didn’t watch Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson. But in advance of this debate, I did go back and watch the 2015 Republican debate.

Always doing the homework, Carlos. Always doing the homework.

Talk about a glutton for punishment.

All of them?

The first, the first. The August 2015 debate. But what struck me about that, in connection to what we saw last night, was how, in their closing statements, so many of the candidates — John Kasich, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush — they all had these very optimistic visions. Like, I turned things around in my state. We can turn America around.

And then Trump shows up, and he’s like, we don’t win anymore. Since he was leading in the polls, I guess he was the final closing statement. We don’t win anymore. We can’t do anything right. It was a very contrasting dark vision from the others.

Fast forward to 2024. That is overwhelmingly the vision you’re getting from the majority of the candidates, that notion of darkness, of doom and gloom, which was actually captured well by the moment that Ross mentioned, when Ramaswamy says, we lack purpose. We don’t remember who we are. There’s a national identity crisis. That kind of darkness to me seemed to permeate a lot of the debate, whereas it was an outlier eight years ago.

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. Ross, Vivek Ramaswamy, does he read as a person that you would recognize from your undergraduate days at Harvard? I mean, is he a type of guy?

I feel like that’s a very loaded question, Lydia. As we established in an earlier episode, I’m the only Ivy League jerk on this podcast. So I feel like —

I mean, there are certain kinds of affirmative action that we can’t escape.

Talking smack about my fellow Ivy Leaguers, you got to be careful with that. Yeah, I mean, I would say Vivek Ramaswamy is very good at talking in public. I don’t know how that sort of smartest, most talkative, most aggressive guy in a room plays with actual voters. It’s been hard to tell with Ramaswamy. There clearly is a real bump in his polling, which is why he attracted so much attention last night. Whether it’s a bump from 2 percent to 6 percent or 4 percent to 12 percent depends on the polls.

And so it’s a little hard for me to say what are the limits on this kind of sales pitch. But the last thing to be said is that, in that exchange with Pence, I mean, Ramaswamy’s clearly right. Like, this is part of what makes his candidacy interesting is that he is leaning into certain fundamental realities of American life. There is a mental health crisis. There is some kind of crisis of meaning. Things that conservatives especially took for granted — religion, patriotism, these kinds of things — are in an ebb.

And whether his style is the right way to address that and channel it into a post-Trump candidacy, I’m reserving judgment. But he’s not just pulling things out of the air. He is actually trying to lean into where the country and especially a chunk of the Republican Party actually is right now, which is not, to go back to Carlos’s 2015 analysis, what anyone but Trump was doing.

OK. I’m going to jump in here with the message may be great, but the messenger was absolutely atrocious. And I’m going to go out on a limb here, before any of us have seen any of the polling, and say —

We’re here to catch you.

Punditry.

We’re here to catch you.

Real punditry in the wild.

I think the women are going to just look at him and go, what the hell. I am serious. Like, even on Fox last night, there were four panelists yammering in the background. The three men — or the men were OK with him, and the one woman was like, this may be the most irritating creature on the planet. He was like a combination of bad tech bro and bad frat bro. He’s like my dachshund on cocaine and so obnoxious.

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you, Michelle. And it’s hard. It’s hard for me to — because I just had such a strong, visceral, like gut-level disgust at his whole affect.

But that’s how presidential politics works, but yeah.

Absolutely. No, it’s all happening in —

They don’t care what he’s saying.

— the kishkas. Yeah, no, you’re in the kind of lizard brain zone there. But I thought it was really, really interesting. And I want to talk a little bit about Nikki Haley because I think she turned in a really interesting performance. But you could just see — and of course, there’s something really delicious about the fact that she is the other kind of Indian-American on the stage.

But she’s also a woman. She’s also a person of real and significant accomplishment. She’s been the governor of an important state. She was the UN ambassador. We can debate lots of things about her record, good or bad. But boy, she really took him to the woodshed. And for me, that was incredibly satisfying to watch —

Same.

— as television. Because I just sort of felt like, here is a smart, accomplished middle-aged woman just taking this sniveling little guy down. And it was so satisfying. And I had to think, regardless of your politics, how many women were watching that and thinking, yes.

You go, girl.

I totally agree with you.

He’s just so gratuitously a twerp about his insults. Step back, junior.

I feel like I have to defend him now. I feel like I have to step in.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

You don’t. You don’t.

No, no, no, but no, here’s what — no, I mean, I’m not inclined to. But I almost feel like I’m — like I see conventional wisdom coalescing before my eyes, and I’m worried.

So here’s what I took away from him. First, I thought that there was this really interesting mix of incredibly generic and yet vaguely refreshing. First, the generic — the generic was that so many of his moments were rip offs from other — just go to past debates or past political speeches. First, I know you’re wondering, who’s this skinny guy with a funny last name, which is the Obama line.

Where have I heard that before? Hm.

Yeah. Then, when he went after — I think when after Pence about, oh, there’s your canned, rehearsed speech, which is exactly what Chris Christie said about Marco Rubio in New Hampshire. And then, I’m going to put the interests of Americans first, which is just an America first riff. There was nothing kind of new about what he was saying.

But there was one moment that I loved. And it’s like when Pence kept saying, we need a government that’s as good as its people. And Ramaswamy’s like, I don’t know what that means. Why do you keep saying that?

And to me, that was — maybe it’s because I have Pence issues that I just really rallied around that Ramaswamy moment because it’s true. Pence was offering these very platitudinous comments, and Ramaswamy’s like, what does that even mean. Like, why do you keep saying this? And so I appreciated that.

Now, what I thought was interesting is that so many people have said that Ramaswamy, by sucking up so much attention, was the winner in this debate. But by sucking up a lot of attention, he also ended up giving other people their best moments, just in counterpoint to him, whether it was Haley on Ukraine, Pence on experience, Chris Christie on depth. You’re an amateur.

ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, which, the moment I heard it, I just thought, yes, that is exactly what this sounds like. And so, to me, it was sort of a double-edged sword for Ramaswamy because, by sucking up so much energy, he also allowed people to shine against him. And some of the best moments —

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

We’ve been talking for a while in this podcast, and no one has mentioned the name of the man who is, even now, second in most Republican primary polls.

How did you feel he did? He was your guy, Ross.

What is this — [SIGHS]

Before he proved himself to be bad, he —

There’s a paper trail. There’s a paper trail, Ross.

There is a long paper trail.

You loved him. Now, you don’t have to love him now, but how do you think he did?

The guy is Ron DeSantis. Come on. He’s not Voldemort, not yet.

Governor Pudding Fingers — how did he do?

So I thought that DeSantis did fine. And that’s a big problem for him because we aren’t talking about him. He’s conspicuously losing by 30 points to Trump nationally, by 20 points in Iowa, so “fine” is not enough.

He basically ran what seemed like a kind of front runner’s shtick where he didn’t really engage with anyone else. He delivered sort of stump speech lines with a lot of intensity, not a lot of finesse. He avoided any opportunity to really mix it up. At the same time, nobody attacked him. Nobody laid a glove on him, and he got to give versions of his, we did it in Florida, we did this, we did that, worked in some of his biography, that kind of thing.

But to my mind, my alleged, quote unquote, “love” for Ron DeSantis just reflects the fact that DeSantis has been the only candidate who has tried to put himself in a position where you could imagine him uniting enough of the party to beat Trump. And he’s failing at it at the moment. That’s obviously clear. But watching the debate, it’s not like anyone else was even trying to do that.

Pence and Christie are running for the leadership of a very small faction in the party. Ramaswamy is running as Trump’s understudy. The other candidates who could conceivably play the DeSantis role — like, Tim Scott — we also haven’t mentioned — he was a non-presence, just a nonentity.

That was really surprising to me.

I expected better.

Yeah. So, to me, my basic view of the debate in terms of the politics of the primary is sort of status quo. And status quo is good for Trump, so it’s a good night for Trump. But nobody stepped up and said, here’s why I can do what DeSantis is trying and failing to do better. Everyone else was a more factional candidate than DeSantis himself.

His failure is that he hasn’t figured out a way to get the people who are like, I hate Trump and I love when Chris Christie attacks Trump, and so I’m going to vote for Chris Christie. At some point, DeSantis needs those voters.

I mean, but also, he just is not appealing. I mean, I don’t really know how else to say this.

No, no. He’s not an especially appealing public candidate. I think we can say that for certain.

Yeah.

DeSantis’s stuff was all — it was abortion, blaming George Soros for the destruction of American cities, civics, not critical race theory, in schools. I mean, it was sort of —

But like civics, not critical —

— the DeSantis shtick. And so — [INTERPOSING VOICES]

I’m saying that critical race theory is not a — that’s something that 80 percent of Republicans agree with.

Sure, sure.

No, no, no, I get that. No, all I’m saying is that, last night, there was nothing that changed for me about what Ron DeSantis was pitching. It was sort of what I’ve heard from him again and again. And so he didn’t stand out in any way. It’s like, yeah, I’ve heard Ron DeSantis say this before.

Totally. I totally agree.

If you’re in a running in a primary against Donald Trump, it seems like you saw two things last night — people who wanted to be Trump and people who wanted to beat Trump. And Vivek Ramaswamy wanted to be Trump. He was like the proxy there for Trump. Then you had Christie and Haley, who were coming out against him. But then you had Pence and DeSantis, who were trying to have it both ways and couldn’t decide if they wanted to be him or to beat him. And that kind of mushy middle is taking them nowhere.

I can’t help but —

Wait, wait. No, wait, wait. But there is no way to beat Trump in a Republican primary the way Christie is trying to beat him. Chris Christie can’t be the Republican nominee this way. The mushy middle is — it’s failing, I agree. It’s not working.

But the other strategies are not better. The Christie strategy and the Ramaswamy strategy, I think — I mean, the Ramaswamy strategy is Trump drops out for some reason, because of his myriad legal problems. And then Ramaswamy is Trump. But in a world where Trump is in the race, Ramaswamy is not going to be the nominee.

Not to get all Freudian on this, but there are very clearly some Oedipal dramas playing out here [LAUGHS]: and some big daddy issues. So I guess one last thing that I would ask is — traditionally the question is, at the end of a debate, who won. Did anybody win? Did Trump win?

Trump won, yeah. Absolutely. He didn’t gain something new. But the debate maintained the basic status quo, and he gains from that. I think Tim Scott is the loser of the debate. He’s the guy who went in with an opportunity to supplant DeSantis, and he did nothing on the stage, didn’t register. So he’s the clear loser. Everything else seems like a balance, a stalemate that favors Trump.

And I think Vivek’s got a great shot at a Fox News hosting career.

Right, or, God forbid, a cabinet-level position for an agency that he’d like to destroy if Ron DeSantis isn’t busy slitting throats instead.

He’ll be commerce secretary.

I think he’s going for a media slot. I really do.

Well, I mean, you know —

Why not both?

— let’s take a break. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about the elephant who wasn’t in the room but was in a different room on Twitter, Donald Trump.

?] Oh, Lord.

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OK. We’re back. So some of us who are gluttons for punishment actually watched the Trump interview with Tucker. Some of us just looked at the transcript. Others of us, I don’t know, decided to go out and touch grass instead. What was that interview?

That was a disgrace is what it was, but it was completely predictable, which is why I couldn’t actually sit through it. Because you’re used to him rambling incoherently and doing stream of consciousness and jumping from one topic to the other when you’re watching him. But if you read the transcript, it’s even scarier because it becomes all the more glaring that he is living in some kind of QAnon fever dream and that Tucker was just goading him right along.

I mean, we’re talking about multiple questions about whether people are going to try to assassinate him, some long discursion on Jeffrey Epstein. Trump rambled on about the Panama Canal and electric cars.

Water pressure. Don’t forget, he talked about water pressure.

Water pressure?

This is a familiar Trump theme is that the water pressure in your shower is bad. But the fact that we got an Epstein question from Tucker and a UFO question in the actual Republican debate I felt was a breakthrough for those of us interested in such things. And I’ll leave it at that.

[LAUGHS]:

No, I won’t leave it at that because we’re going to remember Chris Christie pivoting to teachers’ unions instead of answering the alien question when things happen.

I thought Christie handled that completely silly question quite well. But the one thing from the Trump interview, Lydia, that I did think was interesting, just the one substantive thing, was Trump continuing his tear against mail-in ballots. This is very interesting because the Republican Party has been changing its tune.

And a lot of governors and a lot of officials are now trying to get people to embrace mail-in ballots. But he was on a pure, no, this is wrong. You’re going to have cheating, it’s inevitable, last night. So if you let him roll like that, he’s going to do things that are not going to be in the best interest of whoever the party’s nominee is.

Well, yeah, and I think what’s really striking is he not only sat out this debate. He was essentially — like, executives from Fox, the head of the Republican National Committee went groveling to ask him to participate. And what all of that really made me think was, political parties are really important and play a vital role in our political system.

And the fact that the Republican Party did not have the ability to basically say, if you don’t show up on the debate stage, you actually can’t be a candidate for our nomination, in the same way that they said, oh, well you have to commit to supporting the eventual Republican nominee — that was a threshold for the debate stage — I just think that it illustrates some really, really, really, really, really fundamental weakness in our democracy that the guy who is the far and away frontrunner for this major party nomination is basically just waving his middle finger at that party. But it really is shocking.

I mean, the other sort of obvious thing about the interview with Tucker is that it was, of course, Trumpian and rambling and returned to all of his fixations. But it was full-on Trump versus Biden general election stuff. I mean, there’s a tiny bit of stuff about the Republican primary, but it’s basically just, Biden is terrible. The Democrats are sick, or the Democratic leaders are sick. Some Democrats are good people. Biden’s too senile to run. China is eating our lunch, all of these things.

He’s totally running as a frontrunner — as the nominee, in fact.

Yes, he’s running as the nominee, and it’s clearly just a show of strength that he doesn’t feel like he has to engage at all. And at the moment, he’s right.

He basically skipped the Republican debate twice. He skipped it by not showing up at the debate, and he skipped it by basically ignoring them in his interview with Tucker and just, as you say, running against Biden. So it’s like a double insult. Like, not only do I not have to come to the party, but I’m not even thinking about your party. I’m thinking about another one.

And why would he? Why would he bother? They’re going to let him do whatever he wants. If he had showed up at the Milwaukee forum last night, they would have let him in if he had refused to sign anything. They’re not going to make him do anything because it’s not that there’s a official Republican Party and a Trump Republican Party. He is the Republican Party.

There was that pathetic moment when they asked everybody to raise their hands on stage if they would continue to support Trump if he were convicted. And basically, what, two people didn’t, Asa — and Christie was wiggling his fingers in a weird way that just confused everybody. That was sad. I mean, even Mike Pence, who was up there to talk about how he had been unconstitutional or whatever — it was just pathetic.

Well, I mean, look, we’re recording this on Thursday morning. And we are soon to be treated to the surreal spectacle of Donald Trump turning himself in —

Again.

— again, yes. But I don’t know. It just hits different every time.

It’s not surreal anymore. It’s commonplace.

That’s right. It just means it’s a weekday, Lydia.

Hits the same every time to me.

[LAUGHS]: Another day, another indictment. Yeah, I mean, whatever happened in the debate, Donald Trump is going to own the headlines today, right?

Oh, always. With him, any attention is good attention.

Does he have any reason to ever grace a debate stage again?

No.

I mean a primary debate stage? I think he definitely wants to debate Biden. But I don’t think anything that happened yesterday gives him any reason to return.

No, I think the reason why he would have to debate is if there is a kind of stronger consolidation of an anti-Trump vote in Iowa, because right now in the polls, he does look somewhat vulnerable in Iowa. Just going to throw out that, in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, Donald Trump is not leading by 50 points. He is leading by 25 points, and his numbers are —

A mere 20 points.

— 40 percent, in the low 40s. And it’s not a situation where 80 percent of the Republican Party is saying, we’re just voting for Trump. So I think what forces him to debate is a sense that he could be vulnerable in Iowa. And if he’s ahead by 25 points there, he shouldn’t, strategically. But if he’s ahead by 10 points, he should.

Although he also knows that he can lose Iowa and still win because he’s done it before. I mean, let’s not get all that excited about Iowa.

He can, but if he wins Iowa, it’s probably —

Over.

— all but over. So why would you not try and win Iowa?

Yeah, especially given all of his other difficulties.

I don’t understand a lot of what he does. I’m just saying.

Of course. But I mean, look, if you’re Donald Trump and you’re staring down these indictments and you see becoming president again, or at the very least being the nominee, as your kind of insurance policy against rotting in a prison cell, then, yeah, you want to win Iowa. I would say all options are on the table and one thing we know about Donald Trump is that he is completely immune to any kind of accountability for changing his position on anything.

What’s the quote, Carlos? Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

A foolish consistency.

Well, what I learned last night is that consensus is the opposite of leadership. That’s what I learned yesterday.

That was a great line. There’s a campaign slogan.

I think we should maybe probably leave it there. Thanks for your hard work watching all of this, guys.

It was magical. It was magical.

Many more to come.

Yeah, let’s take a break. And when we come back, we’ll get hot and cold.

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All right. We’re back. So who’s got the hot/cold this week?

I do. In my household, we have been hot for the story of the HMS Bounty, the famous British vessel that suffered a mutiny in the 18th century and thereafter inspired multiple treatments in film and literature. My wife and I sort of accidentally ended up watching one of, I think, the more forgotten adaptations of the story, the version from the early 1980s with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins.

And the adaptation was much better than I expected. It’s like a solid B plus/A minus movie that maybe is unjustly forgotten. And it inspired my wife to go read “The Bounty” by Caroline Alexander. And she has been reading fascinating passages to me aloud for the last week or so. So I think the time is ripe for a new “Bounty” adaptation. It’s a great story and the kind of story that should be filmed at least every 25 years or so.

I want to pick something out of what you just said that has nothing to do with the movie, though. You’re saying that your wife is reading passages from the book to you.

I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like we’re sitting around smoking pipes and [INAUDIBLE].

Yeah, I love that. My husband and I used to do that all the time before we had kids. And I know Carlos and his kids read aloud a lot. And we haven’t done it with my kids obviously in a long time because, now, just getting them to sit in the same room with us can be a challenge. But I love that and just the whole kind of feel to people doing that. So that has nothing to do with the show you’re talking about. But I just want you to know, Ross, that that warms my little heart.

I mean, to be clear, she’s not staging dramatic readings in the middle. It’s more like —

I sit around reading reading passages to Ross when I find something I really like, yeah.

That is so beautiful.

This is making me feel very self-conscious, that the thing that my wife and I do is we show each other pet videos on TikTok, so —

Aw, that works, too.

— a different way of connecting.

It’s just as romantic.

Just as romantic.

It is extremely romantic.

I will say that having read, as we discussed — we all talked about the David Grann book, “The Wager,” which is just a real rip-roaring read about mutiny at sea. It definitely whetted my appetite for more stories of seafaring adventure.

So just to sum it all up, we here at “MOO” are very pro mutiny. We’re hot on mutiny.

[LAUGHS]: Don’t tell our bosses.

Don’t tell our bosses.

This is a chance — Michelle, I think you’re the first — this is the first time we’ve admitted on the podcast that we informally refer to “Matter of Opinion” as “MOO.” Now it’s out in the open. We can just say it. We can just say, this is “MOO.”

I don’t do this. I don’t say that.

I know, Ross, but we —

I have never said this, and I’m not going to start. “MOOtiny” on the bounty. OK, sorry.

Oh, see?

We’re done. We’re done.

It works. I’m not taking any more of your nonsense.

Full circle. Full circle.

I think that’s — listen, I think somebody’s got to be the grown up and tie the knot on this one.

And it’s not Vivek Ramaswamy, so it may as well be Lydia.

Oh. Guys, I’ve really missed you. It’s really nice to be back together.

I’m so happy you’re back.

Aw. I’m so happy to be with you. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here, and see you again next week.

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Thanks for joining our conversation. If you liked it, be sure to follow “Matter of Opinion” on your favorite podcast app. And you can always let us know your thoughts via email at [email protected].

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Stephanie Joyce. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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