How Southern Politics Shaped Trumpism

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David French: I’m David French, and I’m a columnist at The New York Times. Michelle is away this week, so I’m joined by my fellow columnists Jamelle Bouie and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Hi, guys.

Jamelle Bouie: Hello. Hello.

Tressie McMillan Cottom: Hi, there.

French: Because it’s just us Southerners today, I thought we could zoom out a bit and talk about the South.

I’m going to tell y’all a story that is — I’ll say it this way: It’s the first moment when I knew that Never Trump was absolutely cooked. And that was early in 2016.

There had been some glimmers of hope that Donald Trump could be stopped after the Iowa caucuses. Remember, he underperformed there. Then he comes to the South, and I can remember watching him — here’s a New Yorker, a New York real estate developer, a reality TV star. He should not, on paper, be somebody who’s going to really connect with the American South.

But then I looked at him, and I watched him operate, and I thought, “Oh, we’re done. He’s sweeping Super Tuesday.”

Why? Because he was a very familiar figure if you are somebody who’s paid attention to Southern culture and politics. He immediately fit into that mold of Huey Long, of George Wallace, of Edwin Edwards from Louisiana, and I thought, “This person is absolutely connecting at a very fundamental level with his audience.” And he’s kept connecting.

As I said, we’re all Southerners here. Let’s talk about this. But before we dive into the substance of it all, let’s establish our Southern street cred, so to speak.

I was born in Opelika, Ala., raised in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kentucky. I’m coming to you from Nashville right now.

Tressie, what’s your Southern background?

McMillan Cottom: [Laughs.] I could start by saying, “Well, I’m Black.” [Bouie laughs.] But I guess that doesn’t totally cover it all, so I’ll be more specific.

Let’s see. My family is from eastern North Carolina, Robeson County. This may be one of the rare occasions where Robeson gets a shout-out in The New York Times. I’m going to say that very strongly. Robeson County is eastern North Carolina, and we have been there for generations.

I — like you, David — have lived all across this country but have consistently returned to the American South, and I presently live and work in Chapel Hill, N.C.

French: Which is in the midst of a football-induced crisis at this very moment.

McMillan Cottom: Listen, if we want to pivot, I’m happy to talk about the football-induced crisis here.

And, in fact, if you give me enough time and a long enough ramp, I can make it the story of the nation, if you allow me. Bill Belichick coming from New England to Chapel Hill, N.C., to save us from ourselves, at the behest of the state’s Republican cultural elite. If you give me time, David, I can make it work. But, yes.

French: Oh, I didn’t mean to open that can of worms, but believe me, I would love to hear every second of it.

Jamelle?

McMillan Cottom: Tread lightly, my friend. We’re going through some difficult things right now.

Bouie: I have not lived as much around the South as either of y’all.

My mom grew up in Waycross, Ga., which is in Ware County, in the southern part of the state. My dad grew up in Quincy, Fla., in Gadsden County, and then also Fort Myers — kind of back and forth between those two places.

I grew up in Virginia Beach, Va., and then went to the University of Virginia and then lived in D.C. for a minute. Now I’m in Charlottesville, Va.

I think of myself as a Southerner, yes. But also very much a Virginian.

McMillan Cottom: Oh, shots fired, Jamelle. Drawing the distinctions.

Bouie: [Laughs.] I’m not drawing a distinction, but I do think that for people within the South, people recognize the real cultural distinctions between places.

McMillan Cottom: Oh, yeah. I think what matters here is, at this point, we have all said “y’all” appropriately.

French: That’s true.

McMillan Cottom: And that is everybody’s credibility.

French: Let’s get into the substance here.

Tressie, in 2023 you wrote a column called “Why I Keep My Eyes and Mind on the South,” and it’s all about how you can understand where American politics are headed based on what you see in the South. Why do you say that?

McMillan Cottom: Well, I believe it deeply and truly. And at the time that I was writing that, of course, in 2023, there was some nascent hope that we were turning a page on Southern politics and its hold on national politics. We thought we had a strategy even for Trumpism. We survived it once. We can survive it again.

One of the things that I was trying to remind people — something I think Jamelle does particularly well here — is that in fact, what we needed to be concerned about was that Trump had realized how much power he could derive by deeply embedding himself in the ideas of the South, the iconography of the American South.

Unfortunately, I think that is one of the things that we have learned to be true. When we say Trumpism, I’m talking about both Donald Trump and the infrastructure around him that makes him powerful and to a certain extent effective. I think one of the things they learned is that the most efficient way to control the public’s attention was to just hammer these ideas that are deeply, fundamentally Southern.

These are ideas about race, obviously, and these are ideas about the inherent character of the nation, about who is included in who is excluded — not just constitutionally but whose citizenship is always conditional. These are all deeply and fundamentally Southern relationships of power.

But I also would like to point out that the reason those ideas are so rich and so powerful in the South isn’t just that the South is uniquely racist. It is because that’s where the nation shunts all of those conversations. So we tend to hold all of that energy, all those ideas, all of those histories for the rest of the country.

And I think that what Donald Trump has figured out — which is something that national politicians have long figured out in this country — is that that well never runs dry.

I thought one of the mistakes we made the first time — and by “we,” I will include myself here, although I would like to say I did not make the mistake nearly as bad or consistently as some of my professional peers did — was in thinking that somehow we had moved beyond that and that you could understand the broader political map and imagine it by looking at it from the vantage point of New York or California or the Midwest. And I thought about the how we missed how an economic, populist message packaged in Trump’s infotainment package would work in the South.

I saw him live in Richmond, Va. I saw him in South Carolina. I saw him outside Atlanta. It was never a surprise to me that he spoke to Southerners. I was surprised by how many of us professional observers weren’t paying attention to how well he worked here, because I thought that was a message for how well he was going to work across the country.

Bouie: I want to add a note to Tressie’s last point there. One observation everyone in this conversation has made and other people have made is the way that there has emerged an almost generic national rural culture.

It’s a certain kind of country music. It’s a certain kind of pickup truck. You see it if you go to rural New Hampshire, if you go to rural Montana, if you go to rural Illinois. It’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rurality.

McMillan Cottom: Mm-hm.

Bouie: And I bring that up to say that it’s both the case that the country will shunt its difficult conversations, as Tressie said, about race to the South and make it a Southern problem. But it’s always been the case that the rest of the country has been fascinated by the South in really important ways.

The people who pushed the narratives of national reconciliation in the decades after Reconstruction weren’t Southerners. It was a bunch of New Jersey academics at Princeton. Woodrow Wilson, although born in Virginia, very much a man of the Mid-Atlantic, you might say.

Hollywood’s fascination with the South — I mean, there’s obviously “The Birth of a Nation” — but you can’t understand the history of American film without a recognition of a real fascination with the imagery and the culture of at least a particular version of the South that pulses through westerns, that pulses through screwball comedies. It’s everywhere.

McMillan Cottom: I was just about to say — TV. We all get a little Southern when this nation is going fascist. It just is what it is, right? We all want to consume the romantic version of the South: the verandas, the magnolia trees, the music, the food.

To Jamelle’s point: When I look out across our popular culture, I’m always going to start paying attention when country music is ascendant. I’m always going to pay attention when S.E.C. football now becomes a national obsession. I’m going to pay attention when the “Bama Rush” girls are driving millions of dollars of free marketing for their university.

Because what that does for people — an audience that is consuming this from outside the South — is we can always say: No matter how bad it is in California, no matter how bad it is in Montana, at least we’re not the South.

And so you consume the palatable parts of the South to make yourself feel better about where the national trend lines of politics are going. But yet we produce an idea of America that says: Well, we’re not as bad as the South, but also, the South wasn’t really always that bad, now was it?

We’re always doing both of those projects at the same time.

Bouie: Donald Trump’s usage of the South — for example, his occasional references to “They took down the statues” and that kind of thing — the extent to which he connected with Southern voters in 2016 and the extent to which the Southern evangelicals become his core constituency, to me, reflects both things happening internally but also this national interest in or fascination with the American South.

The other thing I’ll say, just in terms of Trump as a familiar and recognizable figure — David, you mentioned Huey Long, Edwin Edwards. Part of Trump’s political appeal — and I feel like this isn’t talked about enough — is that he presents himself as this perfect avatar of a kind of patriarchal masculinity. He has all this money, and he has this gilded home, and he has this big family.

Even elements of him that people joke, “If Obama had done that, people would have gone crazy” — such as his multiple wives and multiple baby mamas — are, in this image of patriarchal white masculinity, Southern masculinity, not an issue.

I think that particular image of masculinity is so deeply rooted in Southern culture, going back to the very beginning. And Trump just slots right into it, no problem whatsoever.

French: There is a time in my life when hearing y’all talk about the South like this, I would have bristled a bit. I would’ve said, “OK, I’m going to fully acknowledge that there still are radiating negative effects of the South’s past in the South, no question. But it really has turned a page in a very decisive way.” But I think, for me, one of the things that has been very dispiriting about the present moment is that I don’t think the South has changed as much as I thought it had changed.

A lot of the elements that I thought of what we call the New South — I’m sure you guys remember Atlanta being called “the city too busy to hate,” that it was sort of turning the page on racism in the past through commerce. Hatred was bad for business and so the South was moving on. It was a commercial place. It was a place that was growing economically, growing in population. It wasn’t a backwater anymore.

I grew up in that period right after the civil rights movement, came of age politically after Richard Nixon was gone.

This blip of a moment when the Republican Party, which was rooted in the South, very much started to identify itself around the concept of personal character in response to Bill Clinton.

To me, that was the New South. It had left segregation behind. It had left hatred behind. It was still struggling with the legacy of all of that, but it had largely left it behind. It left all of that populist nonsense behind. And then here comes Donald Trump and makes me rethink almost all of that.

It was as if what we call the New Right now really is truly the old right. It really is an older right than what you saw with Reagan’s Republicanism. And its center of revival is in the South.

I’m curious about this really interesting fusion with the intense religious fervor of the South at the same time that it has this legacy of extremely corrupt political figures, and this symbiotic relationship that they had seems to have persisted into this present era — but channeled and funneled into the person of Donald Trump.

Is that too much to say?

McMillan Cottom: Our perspective on where we are in history is just always shaped by where we enter it. We can have an overinflated sense of clarity about “this is the direction that we are going in.” And I think things are far more cyclical than we are usually willing to admit.

One of the things that some people have struggled with in Donald Trump is the fact that he is a departure from the way that politics were operating in the moment but is not a departure historically. Again, when you talk about the commerce angle and how much we relied on economic nationalism to save the cultural, moral and ethical failings of the American South, that supposes that economic progress is at odds with racial regression.

And what I would argue is that those things have always not just been compatible but have been symbiotic. Slavery is an economic system, so these two things are not at odds. It is just that in the South, they were always hypervisible in a way that other regional economies in this country cannot say.

God bless Atlanta. Atlanta raised me culturally. I owe, like, 30 percent of my personality to Outkast. I grew up wanting to be one of the new Black Americans in the Black elite coming out after “The Cosby Show” and living my great dreams in Atlanta, like every good Black person in the 1990s.

But the idea that there was ever any truth to the idea that we were too busy building a commercial economic powerhouse for Black America for us to be bothered with racism really flies in the face of what was happening on the ground during that time of so-called economic progress.

You can look at something like Bill Clinton’s America. This is also the creation of a police surveillance system that fundamentally pins Black Americans into everything from substandard housing to being geographically isolated out of the economic progress of Atlanta. The cost of living starts to push Black people out of its inner core, for example.

These things are all happening simultaneously. This is about the difference between the reality of our political life and the story we tell ourselves about our political life. And I think what Donald Trump and the G.O.P. — which I always want to take the opportunity to say that these are one and the same now — but what they have been able to exploit is our constant forgetting about that and how much we want to believe that economic progress will take care of these things.

I always hark back to somebody like a Du Bois who says these things are not antithetical to each other. Economic progress and racism are deeply intertwined.

Bouie: In addition to the cultural and political piece, I would identify the economic agenda of this G.O.P. as a national vision of what the South has been, which is a region of weak or no rights for labor, of surveillance, of control, of low wages, of low services and of not just low taxes for those that already have wealth and privilege but essentially their right to dominate the entire economic and political sphere, unmolested by those they perceive to be below them.

That is Trumpism, right? That is Trumpism. It’s important to recognize the way that this is not just a cultural thing that’s happening, that we’re looking at is the influence of an economic model that has appealed to political elites across the country, as it always has.

The first offshoring wasn’t to Mexico; it wasn’t to Vietnam. It was to Alabama. It was to Georgia. It still is. The car factories are in Tennessee because labor protections aren’t in Tennessee.

McMillan Cottom: Oh, yes. Southern politicians go out to the rest of the world and say to them: Our labor is easier to control than the labor is in California. Our labor pool is difficult to unionize in the American South, and this is the deal we’lll make with you.

Every time a Southern politician goes out and they congratulate themselves about building the new car factory or the new battery maker in some rural part of their Southern state or municipality, what they have generally done is they have made a deal with either a national or a transnational conglomerate that says: You do not have to worry about unionizing.

That is the deal. It is a continuation of the same idea.

French: I do think it is interesting you brought up the economic piece of this. I come from a town — when I was growing up there, it was about 8,000 people. We had three stoplights in a rural town in Kentucky. That’s where I spent my elementary and high school years, and it’s unrecognizable now because a Toyota manufacturing plant came there and completely transformed the city.

But these are good, high-paying jobs. They are transformative jobs in these parts of the South, but it is absolutely true that they also pull and draw jobs from other parts of America. And it’s one of the reasons I think so many people have been moving to the South, which is — let me raise that.

One of the interesting elements, to me, about the current national moment is that it’s not just that the politics of the South are so dominant. In many ways, as I mentioned earlier, the culture and economics of the South are growing more dominant as well. And you’ve had a huge migration from other parts of the country coming into the South, into the Sun Belt.

Texas is growing in population. Florida is growing in population. Tennessee — Nashville, where I am — has been exploding in population.

What are you seeing are the reasons for that? What are the reasons the South — aside from climate, which is better than other parts of the country, but some days can feel a little too hot for a little too long — is functioning as such a magnet right now in American migration?

Jamelle, I’ll start with you.

Bouie: That’s an interesting question. It’s a couple of things. It is economic development. And I want to quickly just say that I’m not opposed to the construction of factories down South. I’m opposed to the exploitation of labor.

If you can have well-paying jobs with people who have meaningful economic freedom and input and can collectively bargain, that’s great. It’s when the deal is “You get this job, and also you shut up, and you like it. And if we decide that we’re going to take this job away or we’re going to subject you to worse conditions, you just have to accept it because it could be worse. It could be nothing” — that’s what I object to.

But as far as migration, it’s certainly economic growth. It’s housing. Part of what’s happening is that on the West Coast and in the Northeast, the housing markets are calcified. There’s very little new building. So if you want to own a home, which is still a dream for many Americans, you go to where the homes are, and the homes are in greenfield developments throughout the South.

McMillan Cottom: Yeah. Jamelle points out something really elegant, which is that one of the things that has happened with our internal migration is that plenty of solidly middle-class, upper-middle-class, upwardly mobile white Americans are feeling, at just a basic demographic level, a push and a pull that they have not had to participate in or haven’t felt in quite some time.

We’re looking at a push and pull that is very close to the urbanization of the United States at one point in time. And people are feeling a push out of some places — as Jamelle points out, the high cost of housing, the high cost of transportation. And then I would also say just the friction of trying to support a family life in some of those places, how difficult that then becomes — the high cost of child care being one that I think about a great deal.

And then I think the things pulling people — our culture has been nationalized to a certain point that once you learn how to accept grits and say, “y’all,” you’ll fit in and you’ll do fine. And so there’s less friction there about migrating and moving across a region than I think there used to be.

Also, I want to put a finer point on this thing about economic development and across the Southern economy that you alluded to there, David, which is that, yeah, you can build a new plant that creates all of these good-paying jobs, but the story over and over again has been, especially in the South, that that doesn’t necessarily improve mobility and the quality of life for people native to the area.

The opportunity structure that I tend to be interested in in the South is something like: Build me a wind farm that then transforms the mobility of the people who have been here intergenerationally, who are sort of trapped to that sort of sticky floor of the bottom of the economic ladder in the South.

And what we are seeing here is not just a transplant of people but of ideas that don’t necessarily create that kind of mobility for Southern workers across the South, which then leads to a war, a battle for the soul of rural America that you can feel very tangibly in the South.

It’s just about these demographic pushes and pulls that are moving people around the country in these ways that concern people about their political hold on their homes.

French: Well, you both have mentioned housing and cost of living. In my experience, I’ve talked to a lot of transplants who’ve come to Tennessee. A lot. What they will say, time and time again, is the exact thing that you said about housing and expenses, that they feel as if they just couldn’t afford the American dream in California or New York but they absolutely can afford it in Nashville, or at least they could until Nashville became almost as expensive as some of these cities.

Is there anything that the Democratic Party can learn from this? If you’ve got entire regions of the country that are pulling citizens at scale from core blue areas into these red areas, what can Democrats learn from this, from a matter of policy?

Bouie: I want to make two points about this. It’s going to reflect, I think, what Democrats can do, but the limits of that.

What Democrats can do, obviously, is in places where they have unified control, they can make it easier to build housing. I think Democratic-led states should try to stem the bleeding. Make it easier to construct housing for the people who want to stay, who like where they are. As Tressie said, it is quite difficult to get people to move, and some people are moving because they feel they don’t really have any choice.

But I also want to say that part of the allure of the South as a cultural object — and this is getting back to what Tressie had said earlier about cost of living — is not simply that things might be cheaper but that you have an opportunity to use your wealth, for lack of a better term, to dominate other people.

You can have a big compound in the middle of Texas and drive a gigantic vehicle and use all the resources you’d like and boss people around.

McMillan Cottom: It’s the “Yellowstone”-ification of the country, Jamelle.

Bouie: Yes. And that aspect of it — there’s no policy you can do to compete with that, I guess. Because what a place like California is offering, the trade-off is it’s going to be more expensive to live there. Unless you are in the highest echelon of income earners, you’re not going to be able to hire someone to look after your house for dirt cheap, right? You won’t be able to exploit someone so easily.

But you are going to live in this multicultural, cosmopolitan place where people are going to exist, at least culturally, on some plane of equality. And if you like that kind of life and experience, that’s what you’re in L.A. for, that’s what you’re in New York for, that’s what you’re in Chicago for and all the places that are their own places but offer a smaller or more manageable versions of that thing.

People are going to want to choose that and are going to make the sacrifices necessary to choose that. Then the people who want to be able to live the “Yellowstone” life are going to choose that, which also comes with its own set of sacrifices. So I would say there is really a competing vision of what the good life is in the United States.

And in parts of the South and the cultural imagination of the nation, the South offers one particular vision, and there are things perhaps that blue states — within the South, as well — there are things you can do to sort of say, “Well, if you’re leaving specifically because the cost of housing is so high, we can do something about that.”

But the cultural thing is the cultural thing.

And that’s a struggle that’s not going to happen in the realm of politics, such that it is a struggle and not just simply, like, a thing that is the case about this country that we share.

McMillan Cottom: Yeah. I’m not comfortable with telling the Democratic Party what they need to do. I’m much more comfortable saying, “I can tell you what I think people are saying they need done for them.” And whoever steps into the void to do that, that’s politics, right? Come and give us your vision.

I think one of the things that happened with the Democratic Party in the South — and I’m just going to say this plainly as someone who’s seen it — the Democratic Party just has to reckon with the fact that if it wants to matter politically, it has to negotiate with Black political power.

And if it wants to be viable and competitive with the Republican Party — that is, figuring out a message of economic populism that cuts across some race differences — it had better figure out how to invest in and grow the Black political infrastructure.

One of the challenges, I think, that the Democratic Party is facing in this moment is that the everyday life of Black political life in the South has changed. You see this decline of what we call chocolate cities — a place like Atlanta or D.C. seeing these massive demographic changes, which does weaken the Black political structure of the South, which the D.N.C. needs.

Whichever party is going to respond to the economic pain of America is going to have to respond to how complicated it is to get the right economic message, when so much of that is embedded in racism. And just because it is hard doesn’t mean you get to write off the American South because it’s just too hard to come up with an economic message when you have to also deal with deep racial divisions.

My argument has been: If you cannot sell your economic message in the South, you are not going to be able to win. You do not deserve a national economic message if that economic message makes no sense and is incoherent when you bring it to South Carolina or when you bring it to Georgia or when you bring it to rural parts of the American South. And they have not figured that out.

Now, the Republican Party hasn’t figured that out, either. But what they have figured out is that if you play to the national impulse of grievance strongly enough, deeply enough, you can get people to buy into national politics because there is no local politics happening around them that they can see. There’s no local politics that is serving them.

This is unfair. This is an asymmetry in our political system that the Democratic Party needs that message more than Republicans do. But life is not fair, little girl, as my mother liked to tell me. Politics is not fair, little girl. You still have to go out there and shape a message for them. If you don’t do that, then the national message of grievance will win out every time.

French: In my experience, it’s almost as if outside of the local power centers within the South, the Democratic Party isn’t even taking seriously the idea of competing.

One of the things that is puzzling to me is: Why does, with a few exceptions, the Southern Democratic Party consistently bring candidates to the polls who are every bit as socially liberal as you have a Democratic candidate on the West Coast or the East Coast? How about a more aggressive outreach to more socially moderate and socially conservative voters in the South? It seems as if that very idea is sometimes anathema.

McMillan Cottom: I think the exact opposite is true, that what we see, certainly in my part of the South — I talk to local politicians all the time who would love to support the Democratic Party — is that they have a message to local constituents on the ground who absolutely want, for example, tenant-owned cooperative housing, who absolutely want to increase their local minimum wage or who want a living wage.

These are things that at a more nationalized level sound socially liberal and out of step with our idea of Southern voters but that Southern voters want. They will have a candidate who wants to deliver on that for them locally, but because that message doesn’t fit the Democrats’ national message, they find they don’t get a lot of the state party support for those candidates.

And I actually think that across the South, especially with poor and working-class Southerners, strong economic messages that may sound deeply radical on the national stage can play fairly well at home if they trust the political party.

Now, I think at the state level — again, especially in a place like North Carolina — we tend to prefer a more socially conservative performance of Southern politics. But on the ground, especially when you’re talking about local elections, it is that the Democratic Party wants to run a far more conservative candidate than can excite the base across the rural parts of the South.

Bouie: I want to also add to this point about trust, which isn’t just about Southern politics but national politics.

I often think that the desire for candidates to say “Why don’t Democrats, just once, run someone who holds more conservative social views?” is an attempt to do a shortcut to the trust question.

The equation being offered is if you hold X, Y, Z moderate to conservative social position, this will buy you the trust you need with the critical voters you need to win to be able to win an election. But I just don’t think that works. I think we’ve seen quite clearly it just doesn’t work. The trust deficit is so deep that there’s no messaging along those lines that’s necessarily going to bridge that gap.

So the question is: How do you fix the trust deficit? And that is rebuilding the Democratic Party not as basically a glorified messaging organ but as an actually present local organization that is engaged in the kind of work that local organizations are engaged in.

You can build trust through force of personality, but for parties to build trust, they have to build trust through, I think, actually delivering things to the people they hope to serve. And delivering can happen at the level of the state. It could also happen at the level of parastate organizations.

For example, I think that it would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to make serious investments in Mississippi, a state where Democratic candidates with no investment routinely hit the mid-40s in statewide elections. That’s a clear sign.

It’s going to be really hard to close that gap because of racial polarization in the state. But the gap can be closed, and making Mississippi competitive would be a huge blow to Republicans if you’re a Democrat. It changes the game.

McMillan Cottom: Yeah, it changes the game. It changes the map. It does.

Bouie: Well, what does that look like? That looks like redefining what the Democratic Party is. Mississippi is a state where there is such low state investment. Use the Democratic Party as a private organization, as a venue for public investment. Local Democratic Parties are creating public spaces for people to gather. Local Democratic Parties are providing basic services, fixing your taillight, offering tutors for your kids, that kind of thing.

They would be building trust so that when election time does come around, it isn’t “Vote for us because you have some cultural affinity for us.” It’s “Vote for us because we’ve done something for you, and we’ll do something for you if you put us into office.

French: All right, on that note, let’s move on to our recommendations. Tressie, as the guest of honor, you’re first.

McMillan Cottom: Oh, I am? My stuff lately has not been a whole lot of fun. I just finished rereading for the first time in a while “Deacons of Defense.” So if anybody wants to talk about armed resistance across the American South, I’m primed for that, but I guess that’s not lighter. It’s been years since I last read it, and I found it especially powerful reading it today.

French: Jamelle?

Bouie: I have been on a Duke Ellington kick for some time. Obviously I know who Duke Ellington is, but never really listened to Duke Ellington in a serious way, so I wanted to sit down and seriously listen to Duke Ellington, and I had this experience of being like, “Yeah, this guy rules.” [Laughs.]

McMillan Cottom: As it turns out, this guy is pretty good.

Bouie: This guy’s great. I would recommend his 1943 piece for his first concert at Carnegie Hall. That’s called “Black, Brown and Beige,” and it was Ellington’s attempt to tell the story of Black America in jazz, in a composed jazz symphony.

There is a version of it that he recorded in 1958 with Mahalia Jackson that is absolutely wonderful. You can find that for streaming on Apple or Spotify or whatever, but I highly recommend it.

Don’t listen to it while you’re doing things. Just listen to it and sit with it and actually try to experience it. Because it is just — you’ll listen to it, and you’ll be like: Yeah, Duke Ellington’s one of the great composers of all time. Not just great American composers but one of the singularly great composers that has ever lived.

French: Well, mine is grim. Mine is a movie called “A House of Dynamite.” It’s a Kathryn Bigelow film, and the premise is it’s just a normal day at the office in the American national defense establishment until a ballistic missile launch is detected, and then everything changes all at once in the most tense ways imaginable.

Kathryn Bigelow’s very adept at directing tense thriller-type movies. This one is very tense, very sobering, very good movie. With that, we’ll wrap it up.

Tressie, Jamelle, thanks so much for chatting.

Bouie: Oh, it’s always a pleasure.

McMillan Cottom: Yeah, it’s a real pleasure to see you all, even if it is virtually.

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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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