Brett Meiselas: This is why you don’t put a criminal into office in the first place. This is why we arrest criminals. This is why they go to prison, so that they can’t commit more crimes. Instead, we put a fraudster into office. What do you think he’s going to do? He’s going to commit fraud. This is someone who was impeached for an extortion scheme, and now he’s extorting the American people. This is why you don’t put a predator in office. He is now being a predator against the American people. What do you expect he’s going to do when he’s in office? He’s doing all of these things. And I just think back to former President Joe Biden’s term, when he went out of his way to make sure that people in red states were taken care of, whether it was with stuff like the Infrastructure Act or the CHIPS Act, or when there was aid to be delegated out for natural disasters. And what did Trump and MAGA do? They attacked the guy over and over again. Despite all of that, now you have Trump literally dangling the stuff in front of them, attacking our troops who are suffering from cancer and other diseases due to this toxic waste, and Donald Trump is now just laughing in their faces. It’s such a disgrace.

Brett Meiselas: After the 2024 election, we saw so many people bending the knee, tech executives, a lot of people in the media, law firms… doing everything they can to make their journey down to Mar-a-Lago, to kiss the ring… It just felt like a misread of the moment. And they acted like Donald Trump had this massive mandate when he really only won by a very slim percentage, and they went all in on him, abandoned all of their values that they claimed to have… And now we see a massive shift, a massive political shift, a massive cultural shift, because I think what we saw with Donald Trump is he came out instantly, shock and awe. That was his strategy, shock and awe. But he did not expect the people to stand up… And also, now here we are years later, and everything just seems to be falling apart…  He seems to be devolving kind of into Trump 1.0, where you’re seeing all these staffing issues and infighting and people trying to get each other fired and people lasting five days in a job. And it just reeks of not only incompetence, but it reeks of corruption, instability, and it’s everything the American people don’t want right now.

Brett Meiselas: This is something that has been decades in the making… I don’t even think people totally understand how deep it goes. It’s one of the things we speak about in our new book, WTF America.. is how the seeds were planted for this right-wing infrastructure going back to the ’70s. I’m talking about Roger Ailes in the Nixon administration, having a document that said, “A Plan to Put the GOP on TV News,” and it took him a few decades to actually implement that, along with Rupert Murdoch. But they’ve since built this behemoth, this incredible right-wing machine. I don’t mean that in a good way, but this right-wing machine that allows there to never be another Richard Nixon situation anymore, where somebody is actually held responsible. In many ways, that was the original sin for so many of these people, that they wanted to fight back on. They wanted to build a propaganda machine. And now we’re seeing that with Fox and these right-wing influencers, and they are just polluting the airwaves. They are taking over companies. And it was also laid out for us in black and white in Project 2025.