Opinion | The ‘Empty Suit’ of Trump’s Masculinity (2024)

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Y’all go forth. Do the Lord’s work.

You all are Southerners. I am from the deep South.

That’s right.

South America. Lima, Peru, OK? So, don’t you all try to out-southern me.

Carlos is so South, he comes out the other side.

I was born in south Alabama, and I’m still a Yankee to you.

[LAUGHS]:

It’s true.

From “New York Times” Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

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So our cohosts, Ross and Lydia, are both out this week. But I invited a league of extraordinary gentlemen to join us, Carlos, to dig into what is going on with men in this election. Because a big question emerging from 2024 is what a man wants. Why does Biden seem to be losing them, and why does Trump seem to appeal to so many of them? To help tease this out, we are joined today by two friends of the show, opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie and David French. Jamelle, welcome back.

Oh, hello. And thank you for having me.

And David, it’s always a pleasure.

Welcome, guys.

Well, thanks for having me. I mean, I heard there might be possible discussion of professional wrestling, and so nothing could keep me away from that conversation.

OK, so it’s not exactly wrestling, but we are going to have to start with UFC. That’s because Trump’s first public outing last weekend as a convicted felon wasn’t a rally. It was a UFC championship match. Carlos, do you want to tell us how this went down?

So last Saturday night, he showed up at an ultimate fighting championship match at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. He walked in with Kid Rock, “American Bad Ass,” blaring in the arena.

Our “Times” colleague Shawn McCreesh wrote about this event and said that the crowd was, quote, “diverse in every way, ethnicity, age, nationality, except gender. It was fathers and sons, men on their own, men in suits, men in shorts.”

Now, that is not a surprise. Guys are the quintessential UFC demo, but Trump’s choice to make his first post-trial public appearance there, I think, speaks to his appeal among, let’s say, a certain kind of man and speaks to the kind of tough guy persona that he loves to project. One of the women that was there, Sean McCreesh spoke to her, and she said that Biden’s not man enough to run the country.

It certainly is true that Trump is trying to sell an image of not just masculinity, but sort of, like, a patriarchal masculinity, one that’s sort of a masculinity of dominance. And so something like UFC, where the aim of the people in the arena is to dominate the other person, is very fitting.

But I mean, the UFC is specifically like a pretty right-wing cultural space. That’s been the case for a while. This is good politics, right? You go to a place where you’re going to be welcomed, but it’s sort of like, yeah, if Biden were to go to an NAACP national meeting, I’m sure he’d find an enthusiastic crowd there as well.

So, David, simply by showing up at this event, it seems like he’s making a very explicit, aggressive appeal to men in a very particular, hyper-masculine way, which has not just been seen watching him on the trail. You see him do this at regular rallies.

Well, this is of a piece of what he’s done for a long time, I mean, going back to pre-presidential race where he was at Wrestlemania with WWE. And he had this moment where he actually, quote unquote, “wrestled” at Wrestlemania where he —

Oh, Lord.

— clotheslined Vince McMahon, I believe, and then shaved his head in this quasi-famous moment. But the thing that always gets me when I see him walking into these arenas is the greeting he gets is evidence of the success of his con. This is a guy who sold toughness basically out of whole cloth. And the con is that he is the man’s man, the guy’s guy, and he is absolutely not.

Well, just let me uncomplicate that a little bit, especially when it comes to professional wrestling, which is, if you want to use one adjective to describe professional wrestling, and I would say even, to an extent, UFC, it’s camp. Professional wrestling is camp for straight men.

There’s an advertising line.

[LAUGHS]: And Donald Trump is a campy figure, right? The multiple wives, the many children, the bragging about sexual assault, it’s all sort of a performance of a aggressive and campy and dominance oriented masculinity that really fits quite well in to the environment of professional wrestling.

And that is what people, I think, are responding to, to the extent that they are, like Trump as this avatar of a — it’s not like traditional masculinity, but just sort of like an — I’ll use the word aggressive and dominance oriented. Again, it’s something that is designed to appeal to the insecurities of men who believe and feel that they don’t measure up to what men, quote unquote, “are supposed to be,” which is domineering and sexually aggressive.

It’s sort of performance art masculinity.

Right.

This talk of toxic masculinity. This is more sort of performative masculinity. Not that the two — I mean, I’m sure there’s an interesting Venn diagram there, but David mentioned the Wrestlemania stuff. I mean, he was hosting Wrestlemania events in Atlantic City, like, in the ‘80s. And the Vince McMahon thing was, I think, in 2007.

But you see how it evolves when he moves from that arena to the political arena. It’s the “I’ll pay your legal fees if you rough up some protesters.” I like guys who weren’t captured, right? And then you get to when the looting starts, the shooting starts. And finally, you’ll never take our country back with weakness. You got to fight, right?

So there’s an evolution there. But so much of it feels, in part for the reasons that David alluded to at first, that he doesn’t really fit the part, but it’s performative in many ways, even if it has real life consequences.

So now I want to zoom out here to the general public, and the voting public specifically. Trump does seem to have a message that’s resonating with a broad section of men. At the same time, you hear a lot of complaints that culture and the Democratic Party are too feminized. So, David, you find yourself in a lot of conservative spaces. Why do you think Trump is resonating with so many men?

One of the things, the dynamics right now that’s happening on the right, is, they’re very good at finding extremist left expression. So something that’s very, very negative on, quote unquote, “traditional masculinity.” So you take something that’s pretty extreme on the left, and then what right-wing media is just really, really good at is, then, saying, take that extreme point of view and push that forward as, this is what they all think about you.

And so a narrative has spread that, essentially, manhood itself is under attack, that anything that you think of as traditional masculinity is under attack. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t find somebody in a Women’s Studies Department at Oberlin or something like that who’s going to have written something pretty radical.

But the extent to which, in right-wing culture, it has imprinted at a very deep level that the left doesn’t like men, the left doesn’t like masculinity, it’s really hard to overstate. That has become almost an article of faith in right-wing America. And so, I mean, Trump’s not a manosphere influencer, but we’re seeing this in a number of people, like the Andrew Tates, the Jordan Petersons, the Joe Rogans, where they’re saying, I’m standing up for men.

So if you take a worldview where every one to your left doesn’t men or doesn’t like masculinity, and men are struggling, in many ways, which they are, then you take a look at somebody who’s going to just stand up and say, men are great, men are awesome, being a manly man is fantastic, there’s nothing wrong with it, and a lot of people are going to gravitate to that. And that’s part of the dynamic that’s happening.

Jamelle, do you think this goes beyond conservative, traditional voters?

Yes I mean, it’s important to remember, right, that most voters aren’t particularly ideological whatsoever, right? They have dispositions. They have tendencies or whatnot. But there’s no particular ideological coherence in that even someone as popular as Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, is, I wouldn’t say niche, but they don’t reach the broad swath of voters.

But one of the changes happening in terms of voting behavior is that young men of color, Black and Latino in particular, are moving to the right. And there’s many efforts to try to explain what’s happening here. My own sense is that part of this is Trump-related, part of it is not.

The part of it that’s not Trump-related relates to a finding in analysis of the gender gap that’s been around for about a decade now. And that finding is that perceptions of who a party represents by way of who a party puts forward as representatives really does shape how people understand each party’s relationship to gender.

And so the fact, for example, that Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 really did communicate to a number of voters that this is a party that is geared towards appealing to women, which, for some number of male voters, turns them off.

The other one is that I think we have to think specifically about what Trump has represented in popular culture. So much of the key to Trump, to me, is recognizing him as a figure whose pre-political persona, in some sense, still overshadows his political persona, that, in some sense, people still do not understand him as a guy who is literally the president of the United States. They understand him as a guy who was a celebrity and a celebrity businessman for a long time.

And part of what Trump represented as a celebrity businessman, he wasn’t just a synonym for great wealth. I was literally at the gym. I was listening to Nelly, and Nelly references Trump in the same breath as Bill Gates, like two men who represent great wealth. This is a longstanding thing in hip hop culture. So not just his wealth, but of kind of like an aspirational patriarchal identity. I’m going to use that word again because I think it’s really important.

Trump has a bunch of wives and a bunch of kids, and he can provide for them. And he can tell anyone who wants to tell him something to F off. All these things, they’re part of, I think, American culture, but they are represented in a celebrity gonzo form by Trump. And that is appealing to, I think, a lot of young men who look at that, implicitly or otherwise, and say, that’s the kind of authority I would like to wield.

Trump as aspiration, I think, is so interesting, Jamelle. It reminds me right away when Barack Obama was in law school, he and a classmate of his co-authored a manuscript that was never published about public policy in American politics.

And he talks briefly about Trump as this aspirational figure in American culture. He’s like, people say, well, maybe I’m not Donald Trump yet, but my kids will be. This is in the ‘90s, right? It shows you the length of time during which Trump has performed this aspirational service for us.

Now, I would say about a year ago, on this podcast, we talked about this notion of the crisis of men and boys, looking at the deteriorating outcomes in men’s health and education, even male friendships. And if this crisis of men involves a declining sense of purpose, I would posit that the toxic masculinity discourse maybe extends a little bit further than the Oberlin Gender Studies adjunct faculty.

For sure, yeah. For sure, it does.

But still not to the extent that the right-wing echo chamber believes it does. But to the extent that that is, indeed, a sort of cultural presence, then the appeal of a Trumpian figure that reassures men, however crudely, I think, becomes much more understandable.

This conversation reminded me of a book by “The New York Times” TV critic James Poniewozik called “Audience of One,” exploring Trump’s relationship to TV. We all know how vital “The Apprentice” was and remains to the rise of Donald Trump.

But Poniewozik also suggests that the sort of broader cultural appeal of anti-hero protagonists, like in “The Sopranos,” like in “Breaking Bad,” right, gave license and encouragement for Americans to cheer for the abrasive, the ruthless, the violent, but also charismatic, tough guy. And Trump has worked that groove very, very effectively.

Carlos, I totally agree with you that I was exaggerating for effect on Oberlin Women’s Studies Department. You did have the American Psychological Association came out with a condemnation of what it would call traditional masculinity ideology that went way too far in the way that they took on traditional masculinity. That is a real thing.

But at the same time, so I’m coming from the right and coming from the South, where there’s just lots of talk and obsession about masculinity. The thing that I just keep going back to is the mismatch between Donald Trump and the way in which people pre-Trump conceived of masculinity and who was considered to be a masculine ideal.

And that is the thing that a lot of us who grew up in this look at this and say, what the heck is going on? That’s why I use a word like “con.” So I’ll give you a good example. I don’t know if you guys remember the movie “American Sniper.”

Yep.

This is the story of Chris Kyle. And it was — I remember seeing it here in Tennessee. And you couldn’t find a parking spot in our theater. That movie was an absolute sensation.

And one of the most memorable parts of that movie is when Chris Kyle is involved in a playground fight, and his father goes through this sheepdog, sheep, wolf analogy. And that is there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s the sheep, there are the wolves who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who protect the sheep from the wolf.

And he says, I’m not raising any sheep in this household. So what are you? And at that point, Chris Kyle identifies himself as a sheep dog, as somebody who protects the weak against the wolf. OK? And so it’s a very anti-bullying sort of vision of male courage.

And then here comes Donald Trump, who fits to a T the definition of a wolf, of a bully. The story the right told about itself was that they would be inoculated against the wolf, against the bully, because they have this ethos of the sheepdog.

But then when the wolf arose and the bully arose, they went with the bully, the very person that a generation of young right-wing men were warned about. And so that’s what makes this, in many ways, so much more deeply disturbing even than it otherwise been, because it called into question kind of the cultural enterprise that was happening before Trump.

Yeah, no, I just wanted to make maybe just one quick observation about the ways that the embrace of Trump might not be so incongruous with these cultural patterns. You can’t tell — David has that lovely accent. You can’t tell from my voice, beaten out of me by years of speech therapy as a child, I’m also a Southerner by birth and upbringing.

And my sense is that the sort of laudable qualities of traditional forms of masculinity have to be balanced against sort of a real cultural heritage of various forms of domination of people over others, right? Like a cultural heritage in the South, certainly going back to slavery, but various forms of dependency and dominance that are part of the cultural South that kind of have afterlives into the present that can be seen in Southern religious traditions, that can be seen in how people organize households, and so on and so forth.

And so for as much as there is this very real sense that people ought to defend the weak and stand against bullies out of trying to fulfill a traditional masculine role, it is also true that there are competing traditions, competing notions of masculinity that are very much in line with what Trump represents in not just like the Southern cultural tradition, but like the American cultural tradition.

All righty. Let’s take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to get into whether Democrats have a men problem.

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And we’re back. So we’ve talked about Trump’s gut level appeal for men, but I’m wondering if we can turn that question around. Are the Democrats, and maybe even specifically President Biden, turning men off?

So one interesting thing, if you look at the 2020 election results, basically, Trump and Biden split men in 2020. 48 percent of men voted for Biden, 50 percent voted for Trump. And this was a marked improvement from 2016, where 41 percent of men voted for Clinton and 52 percent of men voted for Trump. My sense at this point, relative to the polls, is that this is just sort of like a “Biden has a problem with voters” issue, and not so much specifically a problem with men issue.

That is a much more sensible conclusion. [LAUGHS]

Oh, god.

I don’t think we have enough evidence to say whether or not this is a specific problem with men. But as we’ve discussed already, there are these gender gaps that are growing. Right? And so, the vast majority of Black voters say they will vote for Biden in the election. But to the extent that those who say they’re going to vote for Trump, that group is disproportionately male. Right? The same for Hispanic voters.

And they tend to be young, right?

They tend to be younger, and, of course, white men. So I do think that there is like Republicans are coded as the male party, in some sense. Trump is coded as —

It’s the daddy party.

Yes, I wasn’t going to say it, but yeah, it’s the daddy party. Stern, authoritarian father. And that is the niche, the cultural niche Trump occupies to an extent as well. And so that’s, obviously, like an influence. But again, the 2020 results suggest that this is fluid. And come October or come November, the gap may be a little smaller than it appears at this point — or wider. Or wider. Who knows?

One thing we haven’t talked about is, if you look at the polling data, especially if you look at the Gallup longitudinal data, men have stayed relatively constant ideologically and women have gotten a lot more liberal. And this actually started before Trump became president.

If you go back and you look around 2014, you begin to see this big movement of young women in a much more liberal direction, whereas men kind of are staying roughly around this kind of 25 percent in this 18 to 29-year-old demographic of people who identify as liberal. Women have gone all the way up to 45 percent and settling around 40 percent.

And there has been a much bigger gender gap in ideology than we’ve seen in years past. And this is very complicated, and it’s going to have a lot of effects over the next several years in our nation. But I think part of this is due to the fact that men and women actually are just together less in really meaningful ways. They’re not dating as much. They’re getting married later in life. There are fewer friends where they’re hanging out together. There’s less in-person time.

So a lot of this is men and women are actually kind of pulling apart in ways that transcend Donald Trump. And if that keeps pulling apart where women, especially young women, are substantially more liberal than young men, you’re going to see this divide, almost no matter who the Republican is, so long as the Republican is not liberal, as long as the Republican is still embodying something about, as you were saying, Michelle, that daddy party element.

So does this map onto policy in any way? I mean, we all hear about women’s issues. Or do you guys think that there are specific policy areas that would qualify as men’s issues? Or is this not about policy at all?

I mean, if you look at the Times/Siena poll and the gender breakdown on the question of like, what is the one issue that matters most to you for this election, you see that the economy, immigration, and foreign policy all matter a little bit more for men than for women. Abortion matters quite a bit more for women than for men.

But other than that, I just think it’s maybe hard to identify particular issues as being for men in any kind of exclusive or overwhelming sense. I suspect there’s ways that we frame different issues that make them more or less appealing and more or less salient to men.

I don’t think this is about policy, really, at all. Now, if you meet somebody who’s like a hardcore MAGA dude, they will come back to immigration 99 days out of 100. They will talk about the wall, and they’ll talk about immigration —

Although so do the women. Seriously.

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely true. The hardcore MAGA women go back to immigration. But if you really talk about this connection at the base level, it is about the fighting of the left, the owning of the libs. It is just whatever Trump is for, as long as he’s not those guys, is the source of the connection.

And the interesting thing is Trump is such an empty suit on policy. The idea that you’re going to really — aside from some of his few consistencies on immigration and some on trade, that there’s a sort of almost diabolical genius to that, in a way, because he then becomes the empty suit that everyone pours their policy preferences into. And so the Christian nationalists think he’s going to be their great anti-p*rn crusader, which you can’t even hardly say out loud without laughing. But this is how —

He’ll give the p*rn industry hush money.

Aw.

[LAUGHS]: And then you have others who would see him as your great and mighty crusader for whatever their issue is. The neighborhood I live in is 85 percent Republican, and the amount of policy discussion that I hear about why people are with Trump is very low.

The amount that is all about fighting these other forces that I talked about earlier, whether it’s the elite universities, the American Psychological Association, you name it, fighting those people, that is what gets people out of bed in the morning. And it is not this, “well, he has this policy suite and menu that appeals to men.”

So is there anything Dems could do with their message or messengers that would draw men back in?

I think this is actually a really useful question because I want to distinguish between Democrats as a party and sort of the left as a cultural movement. So is there something that I would say that Democrats of a party have done? Well, I mean, obviously, it has very intentionally leaned into women’s issues because women are a larger proportion of the Democratic Party.

But that’s what parties do when they understand what their constituency is. So it’s sort of hard to fault them for leaning into their own constituency. But it isn’t so much Democrats that really motivate Republicans as the left, and Republicans conflate the two completely.

And so, I do think that there are things on the left — and I mentioned one of them, this American Psychological Association indictment of traditional masculinity ideology. That just spread all over the place. And that’s not part of the Democratic Party platform, but it’s sort of perceived as coming from the same world and the same universe.

And so what you have often is where the Democrats, as a political entity and a political party, are having to appeal to voters who have been turned off not by the Democrats, but by the left, and those are different entities. They’re not identical entities. And that I think that creates some real political challenges for the Democratic Party.

I just want to quickly second David’s take that people get annoyed at a blue-haired barista, and they think, oh, the left, right? Like, [LAUGHS]: they see on TikTok someone complaining about men. And they think, oh, Democrats. And people don’t make a distinction between a person that annoys them and a political party or even an ideological movement. Right?

Like, just because someone has terrible opinions on X, Y, or Z doesn’t mean they identify with a particular ideology, but that, in my experience, people will be like, why isn’t the left condemning — and they’ll point to a random person that annoys them on the internet. I think that the fact that in today’s media environment, we are all exposed to lots of people that annoy us is an underrated aspect to polarization because the human brain is not meant to be exposed to that many people who annoy you.

[CHUCKLING]

All right. I’m going to ask a final question here, which is looking forward. Where is this headed? Does it go away when Trump does? Or is this split going to just keep getting wider and wider?

I don’t think that this dynamic is going to have all that many legs, right? There are other Republicans trying to do this sort of like masculinity thing, manliness thing. But I watched Josh Hawley at that event, in his tight black t-shirt, talking about masculinity. And it was sort of like, come on, man. [LAUGHS]

Nice try.

Because Trump has this pre-political persona. That is where all this juice comes from. And none of these other guys who hope to kind of emulate Trump have that. They don’t have the same kind of juice, not Josh Hawley, not JD Vance, not any of them. And so my sense is that there will still be a gender gap, right? The gender gap is a longstanding part of American politics, but I don’t think we’ll be having this kind of conversation without Trump in the mix.

David.

I’m going to agree with Jamelle on that. You watch MAGA crash and burn when MAGA is disconnected from the person of Donald Trump. Because what works for Trump doesn’t work for Josh Hawley. There is a credibility that he has or a pre-existing set of loyalties or affection that he has that just nobody else does. And then when they try to put on those Trump clothes, so far, they’ve failed. And they often end up looking not just vaguely ridiculous, but actually ridiculous in the attempt.

I have maybe a similar sort of concluding thought, but perhaps a slight variation on a theme.

Ooh.

I imagine there’ll be a gender gap in the results of some kind. And in an election that’s as close as people anticipate this one will be, we’ll be able to point to many factors, including the gender gap, as completely decisive. Right?

Now, the only thing I’ll venture to say beyond that is that I don’t know that this goes away when Trump goes away. The one question I’ve wrestled with throughout the sort of Trump years is whether Trump changed the country or revealed the country. And I think it’s both. I think he changed it by revealing it, right? And the fault lines that he loves to stomp on won’t go away when he exits the scene.

And what I kind of hope is that once he’s not this sole force forcing us to choose — you’re MAGA or you’re resistance, you’re pro-Trump or you’re against him — then we’ll have to deal with these issues more directly. We have to move beyond the kind of pro or anti-Trump discourse and delve into these more meaningful and painful debates that will still be present.

Ain’t that the truth.

All right. On that upbeat note here, obviously, if you wrap all of this together, what does it add up to? Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in 2028. There you go.

At long last.

You heard it here first.

The answer to our national prayer. There we have it.

There you go. All right, lads, we’ve got to leave it there. Many, many thanks for your insights and expertise. We’re going to take a break. And when we come back, one of you is going to get hot or cold.

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And we’re back. And it is time for Hot/Cold, that magical moment when one of us shares something we’re into, over, or somewhere in between. So my panel, who has the Hot/Cold for us?

I believe I’ve been appointed.

Oh, sweet.

And I’m going with the hot element, and it’s the WNBA right now. Because there’s some drama going down, and it’s around the Caitlin Clark phenomenon. So Caitlin Clark, Iowa basketball player, was a sensation in college, broke Pete Maravich’s all-time scoring record. She holds the record for both men and women.

There were games in the women’s tournament, the NCAA women’s tournament, that had higher ratings than the men’s tournament for the first time ever. And so she came in to the WNBA with an ocean of hype around her and encountered a bunch of very world-class athletes who have a lot of pride and had no intention of allowing a rookie to walk in and dominate the league.

And the result has been a lot of rough play, a lot of questioning of Caitlin Clark’s abilities and talents, questioning whether everything from very meta to, is she only viewed as sort of this great transcendent talent because she’s white, to much more sort of normal basketball drama of the new kid on the block has to pay her dues, and all culminating, as all things do and should, in a tremendous rant by one of the great living americans, Sir Charles Barkley, who admonished the women of the WNBA to don’t be as petty as the men because —

No, I want to fight for women’s right to be petty. Come on now.

He was saying there’s an enormous amount of pettiness being poured out upon Caitlin Clark.

— which is exactly what happens when a young, very hyped star comes into the NBA as well. But the whole thing is fascinating, and it’s probably the most discussion that we have seen of the WNBA in games in the WNBA in the history of the League. And it’s fascinating. I’m here for it. And have y’all followed any of this?

So I don’t watch the games, I’m embarrassed to say, but I just cannot avoid the clips on social media. And they are both salty and juicy, and they are so delicious. And this is exactly what I think the league needs to get it the attention that it is often not able to drum up. So I’m all for it. I’m all about it.

I also love the rivalries that are emerging, not just among teams, among players. So I love the drama. I love the commentators that say idiotic things and then worry about walking it back. I love that Barkley’s in the middle of it because he’s always been one of the most outspoken, both as a player, “I’m not a role model,” and as a commentator. And also, David, I have struggled to get sports on “Matter of Opinion,” so I am just eternally grateful for you to at least raise it in a Hot/Cold.

Carlos tries so hard, David.

Oh, I’m happy to do it, Carlos. Happy to do it.

I was at my son’s Little League game, and I’m hearing parents talking about when the Indiana Fever will be playing the Washington Mystics, just so they can go see Caitlin Clark.

Brilliant. David, thank you for bringing us that. And thank you and Jamelle for helping us dissect the American male psyche. You need never prove your bravery again.

Any time, guys. Please come back.

Our pleasure.

Yeah, thanks for having us. [MUSIC PLAYING]

And thank you, dear listeners, for joining us today. Before we go, I want to urge everyone to go and listen to our last episode to hear Lydia’s excellent conversation about the historic South African election and its significance for the rest of the world. If you have a question you think we ought to talk about, share it in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440, or email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com. And we may try to answer it in a future episode.

This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett, Vishakha Darbha, and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It’s edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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