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Tom Hanks isn’t exactly the face of radical politics, yet Susan points out how even he’s become a target with West Point refusing to honor him. She remembers his Saturday Night Live reassurance after Trump won his first term back in 2016 — it’s all going to be OK — and how hollow it felt even then. “Sure, Mr. Multimillionaire, of course you’re going to be OK. I don’t know about the rest of us,” she recalls. With ICE agents pulling people off the streets and Trump threatening to invade more American cities, that moment now reads like a warning about who gets to feel safe and who doesn’t.
Sam insists the bigger danger is cultural, not legislative. “We inculturate our children as they grow up,” he says, and when success is measured by how completely you dominate your peers, “we are screwed.” That dominance mindset, Sam argues, has been decades in the making — a shift from Reagan-era greed to today’s narcissism. What it produces isn’t just bad leaders but an electorate conditioned to see cruelty as strength.
That’s the backdrop for Susan calling out J.D. Vance’s applause for an attack in Venezuela that killed 11 people: “That’s summary execution … forget the Geneva Convention.” She connects the dots to Putin in Ukraine and Netanyahu in Gaza, where fire-first logic has become normalized. Sam adds, “All of this is just war crime material,” making clear that what’s being tested abroad is also the playbook at home. Vance’s bravado isn’t about policy — it’s about staking a claim in Trump’s shadow.
Susan doesn’t buy the idea that Vance can inherit Trump’s movement by posturing. She notes his ties to Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, but stresses that MAGA never fully trusted him. “He is a great ass-kisser,” she says, but everyone remembers him once calling Trump “America’s Hitler.” For Susan, that spells factional chaos on the right, and for Sam, it’s a reminder that Democrats can’t treat this like politics as usual — because filling a power vacuum with dominance alone is a recipe for disaster.
Take a look at the Week Ahead with Susan J. Demas and Sam Osterhout.
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