Well, I think we have to do this all over again, don't we? So welcome to a new episode of the To the Contrary podcast. I am joined by Tom Nichols from The Atlantic. Tom, welcome back. Thanks for joining me.

Thanks, Charlie. Thanks for having me back. Okay. I want to start with a mega question or a meta question.

Why are we still so surprised? Why are we still, after all of this, why are we still capable of being surprised?

And I'll tell you what I'm specifically

referring to a little bit later, but you know, at 8 o'clock last night, I'm, you know, sitting there

with, you know, a gin and tonic watching something on Netflix and, you know, made the mistake

of doing some doom scrolling. And it feels like getting kicked in the stomach. And I'm

thinking, why after all this time, are we still

shocked by shit that is coming down from this administration? Help me out here, Tom.

Well, part of it is because we're human beings. And we love normalcy. You know, we keep saying to

ourselves, nothing really. I mean, how bad could it be? Well, that's right. How bad could it how bad could it be you know it's like it didn't

and also it's we're kind of like the guy you know your drunk friend drove you home a few times and it was

a little scary after a night at the bar but you got home every time right you didn't die you didn't

have a big flaming wreck and so it's like well yeah you know he has a few drinks but i mean we he's okay we can well that's true

right up until the moment it's not yeah you know and so that's a part of it that we're just that

we're just people and we we just hate to think, I mean,

this was why, you know, during the Cold War, we didn't want to think about nuclear war, right?

It's too big. It's too, it's not going to happen. Everything's fine, you know, and if we had

known half the shit that was going on, we wouldn't have slept nights. But I think the other part of

it is that people are, especially the people, I think a lot of people who either actively

supported Trump or who kind of made a deal with themselves to say, well, you know, I'm going to

support them because eggs are,

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