Saagar Enjeti Thinks Washington Runs on Autopilot — and Nobody Is Playing Chess

Lex Fridman opens with Saagar Enjeti, a D.C. political correspondent, co-host of *The Rising* with Krystal Ball, and co-host of *The Realignment*. Enjeti has interviewed Donald Trump four times and a long list of people who wield power. What Fridman wants is not the industrial engagement complex of red versus blue. He wants the human beings who seek power, and what power does to them.

Enjeti arrives with a gift: volume two of Ian Kershaw's two-volume Hitler biography, widely treated as a definitive study. Fridman jokes that nothing ruins a first meeting faster than a great book about the darkest parts of human nature, then admits there is probably a lot of truth in the joke. They skip small talk and go straight there.

Enjeti is a biography nerd. He likes Kershaw because a good life of Hitler is a story of the times, not a cartoon of a madman. The first volume puts an Austrian kid, a World War I medal, the stain of defeat, and the Beer Hall Putsch in context. The second gets inside the rooms — with Chamberlain, with Mussolini — and asks how a magnetic figure convinced some of the smartest people in the world, at least until the Soviet gamble. Kershaw and Richard Evans are, he says, two of his favorite writers on the Third Reich.

Fridman asks the question he applies to great and terrible leaders: was the charisma born, or was it trained? Enjeti thinks Hitler worked at it, and also had something innate. Rudolf Hess, slavishly devoted in prison around 1925, lived in the cell and helped compose *Mein Kampf*. How does a crank convince another man he is the second coming? That, Enjeti says, is already political talent. Look at the coalitional politics, at the skill of convincing exactly the right people to follow, and Hitler was a very good politician.

Who could have stopped him? Enjeti has thought about Fridman's version of the question a lot. The answer is Hindenburg: immense standing with the German public, the only real war hero, personally skeptical of fascism and Nazism, convinced the man was dangerous and full of it. He still acted to install him. The generals and Chamberlain come later. The first failure is the one man with a veto who did not use it.

Fridman wonders what evil looks like in a room, because he knows intelligent people who sat with Jeffrey Epstein and did not see it. Hitler, even before power, could convince. Is it words, or a piercing look, or the ability, alone with someone, to talk them into anything? Enjeti says the most educational version of that lesson, for him, was not a dead dictator. It was sitting across from Trump.

Enjeti interviewed Trump four times, including two and a half hours in the Oval Office with a press secretary nearby. He was twenty-five, a kid who had once label-makered "the Oval Office" onto his bedroom. He walked in seeing Kissinger and Nixon on the couch, Eisenhower's golf scuffs by the door, the HMS Resolute desk under his recording phone. Trump was on none of that channel. He was living in the moment. Enjeti hesitated to set a phone on that desk. The president was not thinking about the desk at all.

The most revealing question, Enjeti says, was what people would remember in a hundred years. Trump glanced at a list of accomplishments and said Veterans Choice. Enjeti looked at the harbinger of something new, still unnamed, and thought: it is not going to be that, sir. The public imagines chess. Enjeti came away sure there was no chess. Once, Trump got distracted by a certificate on the desk like a child noticing a shiny object. These men do not think about themselves the way commentators think about them. That was the important finding.

About half of those two hours were off the record, and the man changed completely. He is mindful of when the camera is on and the mic is hot — language, admissions, how he appears in front of staff. After the 2018 midterms a reporter thanked him for the press conference. Trump looked at him and said it was earned media, worth billions: this is for me, not for you. He studied his angles. A planned Oval sit-down moved outside at the last minute because the light was better; Enjeti thought, you are your own lighting director. The official portrait does not smile. He wanted to look like Churchill.

Does he believe he is one of the greats, or is he playing the public? Enjeti thinks he believes it, in part because he does not know that much U.S. history — which is also, in a way, why he was elected. Fridman wonders whether being a history nerd helps a president or gets in the way, first-principles versus the lessons of the past. Enjeti notes that Obama hosted presidential biographers, including Robert Caro, and sometimes used the past to argue his own job was harder. Teddy Roosevelt, a voracious reader, willed the country into something more without a civil war or a world war to force his hand. As for a three-hour podcast with Trump, Enjeti does not think you get past the facade while the mic is hot. He has been this person since about 1976, since the Central Park ice rink and the tabloids. Joe Rogan told Enjeti something that stuck: Trump is the only president who did not age in office. The job aged Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan. Trump lived in the moment, and the hatred and the love did not put years on him.

Asked for lessons from Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Enjeti refuses to treat World War II as a unique lightning strike. He sees those catastrophes as end-payments on older European and Chinese systems: monarchies, balance-of-power wars, serfdom, the century of humiliation. What he studies in D.C. is the same habit. Understand the system, the incentives, and the downside risk of what you built, because that is what produces the behavior. Robert Caro's thousands of unfinished pages on Lyndon Johnson are, for him, life manuals. The Senate is still the Senate. The cozy media-administration ecosystem recreates itself from Teddy Roosevelt yelling at journalists to dinner in Kalorama. The architecture is designed to produce specific outcomes, changeable only in extraordinary times.

If aliens demanded an elevator explanation of American government, Enjeti would say: we pick the people who make the laws, we pick the person who executes them, and together they pick the people who decide whether either is breaking the law, all under a 1787 constitution. His favorite branch to study is the presidency, because personality can still move it. The Senate's personalities have mattered less since Clay, Webster, and Calhoun; power migrated to the executive. There is too much of it there. Absolute power corrupts. But the twist is not that the president is a titan. It is that unless he has a hyper-intentional view of how foreign policy or the Commerce Department must work, those machines cruise on their own.

Trump told the generals he wanted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ended and troops out of Syria. They asked for six months. He said yes. Six months later he announced a withdrawal and they exploded: there was no plan. He does not always realize he is being stalled. By then it is midterms. Enjeti will not call this a "deep state" cabal. The people involved believe they are right. There is no real democratic check, so generations of culture settle into *this is how we do things*. The most revealing line of the first Trump impeachment, for him, was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman saying the president had departed from the policy of the United States. Enjeti's reply: the president *makes* American foreign policy. The bureaucracy thinks the policy is theirs.

Fridman hears the engineer's complaint: first-principles thinking does not care how it was done before, only what works. Enjeti adds the hiring problem. You have to pick a hundred people you trust, who each pick ten more. Tommy Corcoran, FDR's aide, in Caro's telling: government is not one guy or ten. Hell, it is a thousand guys. FDR picked the right thousand. Johnson played them like a fiddle. Outsiders fail because they pick people who agree to their face and then do not execute. Obama compared the presidency to a supertanker you can turn two degrees; Enjeti thinks that is too small if you hire well. Personnel is policy. He will, in the same breath, give the nationalist case against Trump and the progressive case against Obama: Obama brought in Clinton people and Larry Summers; Trump said drain the swamp and hired Goldman and Bush hands, then wondered why a corporate tax cut was the signature achievement.

Money in politics is real, Enjeti says, but this is the least corrupt campaign-finance era in American history if you mean briefcases and vote-buying; Caro's Johnson still did that in living memory. What enrages people is distribution. Politics is downstream from culture and from a Gilded Age split in who the economy works for. Then Fridman asks about the shadow world that Twitter treats as fact. Enjeti's landing spot: most conspiracy theories are wrong, some are true, those are spectacularly true, and he does not know which is which. That is the problem.

UFOs are the conversion story. Three years earlier he would have said you were out of your mind. After Fridman's guests, he is comfortable saying we are probably being visited. He does not picture a green man in a hangar. He pictures a government that has seen things it cannot explain, fears looking incompetent, fears China getting there first, and defaults to secrecy. That secrecy then wrecks trust. On 9/11, watching from Chicago as a kid, he was unsatisfied with the reporting; people like Alex Jones filled the vacuum. The conspiracy he still stands behind is that a lot was covered because it implicated Saudi Arabia.

Epstein is the one that changed his outlook. Leon Black, with a fortune in the billions, sent him more than a hundred million dollars. Les Wexner gave him extraordinary financial run. Why does Bill Gates need a fixer for financing? A Department of Financial Services report on Deutsche Bank, as Enjeti read it, showed the bank soliciting the business, knowing it meant access to other rich clients, flagging hush payments, and still letting about two million dollars in cash walk out over five years as "tips." Fridman, who knows researchers Epstein cultivated, does not start from Mossad. He starts from charisma: a man who made brilliant outcasts feel seen, then stacked implied shared secrets until a simple set of rules looked like an organization. Complexity from simple rules, in retrospect, looks like a plot. Enjeti agrees the implication after the first shady act is the trap. He is more shaken by the people who spent *years* with the man and did not see what he was.

Certainty is what both of them distrust. Fridman wants a minute of empathy even for claims that sound insane; cultural tastemakers have none of it. Enjeti ties that closed mind to a country splitting 50/50, coasts against the middle, a four-year-degree culture against everyone else. A Vox writer on thirty thousand dollars can have more cultural power than a plumber on a hundred thousand. The teams are arbitrary. The hatred is not.

Survey data, Enjeti says, wrecks the center-left and center-right labels. Stimulus checks poll around 80 percent. Florida voted for Trump 3.1 points better than it had for Obama in 2008 and, the same day, passed a fifteen-dollar minimum wage at 67 percent. The real divider is culture, approximated by whether you have a four-year degree. He will own a 2016 error: he thought Trump won on a pro-worker, anti-China, anti-endless-war message. Trump then governed largely as a meaner neoliberal Republican. He still moved the Overton window on trade and war, and Enjeti will always support those breaks. But in 2020 Trump got more votes, more union votes, more Ohio, more Hispanic votes, without delivering that agenda. Negative partisanship did the work. An Echelon poll had Democrats' top concern as Trump voters, then white supremacy as code for the same; the right's top concerns included illegal immigration and antifa as code for the other tribe. In rural Nevada Enjeti saw a sign: "Trump: fuck your feelings." He will not sneer at it. For some voters the middle finger at the elite class is the only cultural power they have.

That is why 99 percent of his public commentary is economics. If he were Biden and wanted to heal the country, day one would be two clean acts: a $2,000 check for every American, and a vaccine for everyone who wants one. No culture-war riders. He does not love Greg Abbott's politics; his Texas family got vaccinated quickly, and he will remember that forever. People remembered Trump's name on a check. Another round, he thinks, and Trump wins. After the first checks, AOC complained they did not go to undocumented immigrants. Enjeti: are you out of your mind? This may be the most popular policy in fifty years, maybe since Medicare, and you are ruining it. The right's version is that the money goes to lazy people. Same vandalism from the other side.

His Biden plan would have put a clean $2,000 check on the Senate floor the first day, forced the five Republicans already on the record to vote, and signed it as the end of a national nightmare. Biden has an FDR portrait and, in Enjeti's count, had passed nothing transformative by day thirty-five. FDR legislated five days in and stacked fifteen bills in a hundred. Coalition politics is why nobody does the obvious: never waste a crisis, in Rahm Emanuel's line, and stuff the long-standing wish list into the popular vehicle. Mitch McConnell tried to hang Section 230 repeal on the checks and killed the package. Georgia followed. Enjeti's counter is that this game has gone on too long. A reconciliation bill may be Biden's only big law. Change the paradigm and you might get more than one.

He has seen the evidence. David Perdue, a corporate CEO type, opposed the original $1,200 checks. Trump endorsed $2,000 and Perdue, running in Georgia, was suddenly with the president. Clean and popular can force a person to do the right thing because it is the popular thing. The production pipeline still fights that. Members fear primaries, not general elections; heterodox people get taken out of context and never climb the ladder. Trump's useful gift, even if he wasted the presidency, was showing that the consultants were wrong. Andrew Yang talking about makeup on a debate stage, AOC's once-a-generation social-media talent, a Trump rally that feels like another world — those are the new animals. Enjeti's 2024 guess is Biden versus someone named Trump. If Trump runs, he is the nominee. The rest is culture, not bills. We may be living through a Grover Cleveland interlude, a twenty-year blip that history files next to the forgotten presidents between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, while spaceflight and the internet are what the era is actually for.

The future of journalism, Enjeti says, looks like this conversation. After the telegraph, information itself stopped being scarce, so reporters no longer compete to say that X happened. They compete to say why, and why is always up for partisan reading. That is usually called a disaster. He calls it a return to the pre-mass-media shape of the press, and he notes that American news literacy peaked in the age of yellow and partisan papers. People like to read writers they agree with. The downside is an echo chamber. The upside is that more people actually read.

Walter Cronkite does not come back. Fame gets small and intense: you are nobody to 99 percent of the country and a daily necessity to a slice of it. Enjeti's news aggregator is Twitter. *The Rising* is openly two biases in a room. The guild-versus-non-guild war of the age, as he sees it, is the *New York Times* against unfettered conversation — Clubhouse, this podcast format — because the paper's power is convincing Facebook it is the referee. Long run, the internet is too strong and the non-guild wins. The mistake is thinking the *Times* dies. "The New York Times will never lose. It will just become one of us." It is already a subscription product for upper-middle-class, largely white liberals, making more money on a shrinking mass audience. That is a legitimate business. It is not the paper of record.

Michael Barbaro is a celebrity to that audience; the paper hires Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher because personalities now wear the brand. Some people take a pay cut in prestige rather than go independent, because their New York circle still prices the logo. Joe Rogan, Enjeti says, is more powerful than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox combined. He created an ecosystem in which later people can succeed, and he shoved a competitive comedy world toward something more generous. Fridman started his own show hoping to do a version of that for scientists. Enjeti once told Rogan he had not known millions of people, including himself, would listen to a man talk about chimps for three hours. Rogan was first, so nobody else will be that famous. That is fine. He built the umbrella.

Even a president, Enjeti notes, cannot simply declassify UFO files. Clinton and John Podesta tried. Trump was asked and said no; the secrecy bureaucracy has its own paperwork gravity. The hopeful reprise from earlier: one person cannot fix everything, a hired team can remake a lot, especially in crisis, because it has already happened. FDR and LBJ were hyper-competent men who understood government and personnel. They were also friends. Three days after Johnson won a special election to Congress at twenty-nine, Roosevelt met him and told someone the young man would be president. Sometimes the future president came to breakfast. Enjeti would give anything to have been in those rooms.

He wants Fridman in two rabbit holes. One is Caro: not really a life of Johnson so much as a study of Washington power after the New Deal, up there with Gibbon on how power works. Johnson knew the levers of the House, the Senate, and the presidency; Vietnam is the disaster that still sits on the ledger, and the civil-rights bills are the thing nobody else could have passed. The other hole is World War I. Enjeti is a Dan Carlin fan and thinks the Great War is more typical of war than World War II: unclear war aims, diplomatic sludge, the next war already in the treaty. Britain needed no draft until 1916 because men walked into barbed wire for king and country. Versailles, in his telling, feeds Vietnam, the modern Middle East, German grievance, British reluctance in 1938, and American isolation. Churchill was nearly alone. Fifty million dead, and the monarchies spill their guts for a hundred years.

From security studies at Georgetown he remembers World War II as the clean, atypical war: the center of gravity is Hitler, so you liberate France, invade Germany, destroy the regime, occupy, rebuild. In 1917 German staff officers could still say the war was worth it because they had Luxembourg. Two million citizens for Luxembourg and a wrecked half of Belgium. What were the British dying for — a Kaiser port on the Channel? That is what most wars actually look like. Carlin, he thinks, is the great popularizer, and the historical guild should stop sneering. The trick Carlin does not miss is the individual in the mud, not only the general staff.

Fridman asks whether popularity becomes a prison: an audience that will not let you think. Enjeti came up in right-wing media as a more doctrinaire conservative in his professional life, and after 2020 the pressure was immense. A sizable part of the audience wanted him to say the election was stolen, to downplay January 6, to justify senators he knows who objected to certification. Most people know him from *The Rising*, a left-right show, so he had the luxury of not dying if the right walked away. He still felt the heat. He would not do it.

He feels more politically homeless than he ever has, and the last few months taught him it is the best thing that ever happened. It is freedom. He says exactly what he thinks. He criticized the right before; what changed is the illusion of a stake in the team. Stop the Steal took the shackles off because the claim was bullshit, it was bad, and it was bad for the Republican Party. If people in the party disagree, he will not necessarily be associated with them. The historian's word he keeps using — intention — is also a personal one. Leaving the system that raised you is the cost.

Enjeti will never quench a thirst for the years 1890 to 1925 in Russia: Alexander's autocracy, Nicholas as a weak and terrible heir, serfdom lasting past the American Civil War. The question that will not leave him is how the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded when Russians did not want Bolshevism, suffered under it, and watched it become Stalinism. Part of the answer is the hollowed-out arrogance of the tsars after Catherine the Great. The sharper part is a sequence of bold, unpopular, intelligent decisions by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin — including killing off the center and refusing the more amenable communists so that one pure strain was the only legal voice.

That is intention again. You can will something into existence even if people do not want it, and it can last half a century. There is a world with Kerensky, a world with Trotsky instead of Stalin, a Soviet story that looks more like the American one. He came to Russia after Crimea trying to get out of a neoconservative cartoon. A Pulitzer-winning book from the Russian side of the 1990s made the introduction of capitalism look awful and the oligarchs look like the reason Putin could run as the restorer of order. "Do you want to go back to the 1990s?" still works. Western nostalgia for Yeltsin is, in this telling, our propaganda. Russian defense theory, back to the tsars, is defense in depth; he is not asking Estonians to leave NATO. He is asking Americans, children of an awesome country, to imagine a history that was not awesome.

Does power change people, or reveal them? Reveal, he thinks. Around 2001 Putin was a deft politician, warmer to the West, because the job was still consolidating oligarchs at home. By the 2007 Munich Security Conference the speech was NATO encirclement and no more being beaten back; Georgia followed. He has called the Soviet collapse a tragedy. Enjeti understands the feeling even when the West hears only menace: a former superpower, shrinking, a petrostate. Putin likely sees himself as the benevolent dictator without whom the system falls, and plenty of Russians may agree for reasons that are not only television. What does he want? Enjeti does not know. Money does not explain Syria and NATO and the coveting of Europe. He sounds like a Russian nationalist who thinks the country should be a superpower. You can describe any tsar in the same sentences. Lenin, in this reading, was a true-believing narcissist. Stalin believed, then the civil war ended and consolidation began, and Enjeti is less sure the rest was about communism.

Asked for the books that marked him, he starts with Caro and hopes the man lives to finish Johnson. The first volume opens with Texas weather and a great-great-grandfather; you meet Lyndon a hundred pages in. That is Tolstoy: a biography of a time, not a person. Ron Chernow's *Grant*, a thousand pages, is the one he tells everyone to read because one life holds the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and Reconstruction — three eras most Americans do not actually know.

The book that may have hit him hardest is *Shackleton's Incredible Journey*, the diaries of the last heroic-age Antarctic voyage. In 1914 the *Endurance* froze, then crushed, with no radio. Shackleton got every man onto the ice with dogs and three boats, lasted another year, and reached Elephant Island. Then he left most of them, navigated eight hundred miles of the Drake Passage by the stars — a man holding another's legs so the sextant would stay true — hit the wrong side of South Georgia, and crossed a range that was not walked again with proper gear until the 1980s, after two years of starvation. Nobody was supposed to be able to do any of it. He did. Douglas Mawson's story is the same country of mind: a crevasse takes the sled, the food, the stove, the tent; they eat the dogs; vitamin A in the liver poisons the partner; Mawson crawls in hours after the relief ship leaves and spends six months learning to walk. Amundsen trained a lifetime and beat a richer, arrogant British party. Scott died on the way back. One mistake on that ice and you die.

Fridman and Enjeti both treat Antarctica as the rehearsal for Mars. The first wave will look like those men. History remembers the ones who did not eat each other; the Franklin expedition's bones say otherwise. People who ask why leave a fine Earth get the Mallory answer: because it is there. The practical case is spillover you cannot score in advance. Apollo was attacked as waste; we went to the moon on less computer than a phone, and Enjeti will define his politics as a national quest for greatness. "We are their offspring, and we fail them if we don't go into space." *Sapiens* is, he admits, the "normie" answer, the book everyone's uncle read, and still worth it because Harari put language on a pile of ideas the way Dawkins did in *The Selfish Gene*. Christopher McDougall's *Born to Run* sits with Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell: find a person, tell a bigger story, remind you that running is in the DNA.

Enjeti grew up in College Station, a fifty-thousand-person university town, the first American child of Indian Hindu parents in a white evangelical culture. Ages zero to eight were cultural ignorance; 9/11, in third or fourth grade, changed the weather, down to T-shirts printed at the temple. He is not offering a race manifesto — he spent much of adult life on the political right — he is saying it was hard to be proud. He entered politics because he hated George W. Bush and the Iraq War and every adult who told him not to ask. Power, for him, started as a question: how do people who create quagmires get the jobs?

At sixteen his father became a dean at Texas A&M in Doha, and two years of high school among Qatari royalty made him the most pro-American person in the room. He wanted to say the royal family treated Indian laborers as slave labor. He could not say a word without deportation and his parents losing their jobs. "You do not know what it is like to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it." Public decency rules, Gulf monarchy, no touching a girlfriend in the street — he came home saying *Murica* and still means it. Live in a non-democracy, even compare notes with Europe, and the American margin of freedom stops being theoretical.

He never thought he would want to move back. The Texas of Rick Perry, oil, and a rural red identity is, in his view, over. Pre-pandemic, the country's top U-Haul route was already San Francisco to Austin. Beto O'Rourke came two points from beating Ted Cruz. The state will not necessarily go blue; the Republican Party will have to change. The movers that count are not only Joe Rogan. Tesla and Oracle, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, employ tens of thousands; that plus a new entertainment complex remakes a city. If he were Musk he would endow UT Austin into a Stanford and build the internship-to-garage loop. Miami, he thinks, is missing a heavy university and those thousand-person companies, so the network effects do not catch. A Gavin Newsom type as Texas governor is not unthinkable. Austin's mayor is already a Democrat. Fridman wants the city to stay weird. Enjeti is finally convinced it might be a place he can live.