Lifestyle
This L.A. escape room explores corporate greed — and shows how corruptible you really are
Word got out that there was a whistleblower wanting to meet. The company was suspicious, but this was the first overt notice that our place of work was corrupt. Should we investigate and see what ethics were being breached, or play dumb and stay loyal to the firm? We were divided.
I wanted to link with the informant — if something is amiss, we should know, even if it put our fast-rising career in jeopardy. But was that out of character for the avatar we had choosen?
This is the Ladder from Hatch Escapes, an interactive experience near Koreatown that explores corporate corruption. It opened this month and has become one of the most buzzed-about escape rooms in the country.
In 2018, Hatch Escapes debuted a highly regarded escape room in Lab Rat, a comedic horror show in which the roles of humans and test rodents are flipped. It’s a 60-minute game, with puzzles, an ending and, of course, a quest to break free. While it won praise for its mixing of digital and analog media, as well as its emphasis on storytelling, Lab Rat is still what many of us understand an escape room to entail.
The fictional Nutricorp is the center of the Ladder, a complex branching narrative that explores corporate greed.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Its follow-up, the Ladder, is not that.
For the past five years Los Angeles’ Hatch Escapes has been rethinking the escape room ground rules. The goal: to prove the an escape room is not mere entertainment but can, in fact, be experienced as a work of narrative art.
Think of the Ladder as a 90-minute interactive movie with puzzles, taking guests through five decades, beginning in the 1950s, in which they will play an exaggerated game of corporate life. Start in the mailroom, and work your way through secretarial and middle-management-themed areas, all the while mixing puzzles, games and choose-your-own-adventure-like choices.
You may find yourself playing a game of memory around digitally enhanced cocktail glasses, as our mid-level exec seemed more interested in company card perks than late nights with the books. Or perhaps you’ll choose to investigate a wall-long switchboard, listening to callers’ problems and trying to connect them with a solution. Elsewhere, in an area dedicated to the 1980s, Nintendo’s “Donkey Kong” gets remixed as “Bossy Kong,” with a suited villain rather than a gorilla trying to thwart our progress. The final room — the corner office — is group game chaos inspired by the popular collaborative video game “Spaceteam,” complete with fully animated windows overlooking a city.
That it incorporates a wide variety of games, puzzles, as well as film and animation — all of it designed to be in service of advancing a story — has made this escape room one that is redefining the medium.
The title screen for “Bossy Kong,” an ‘80s-themed video game in the Ladder.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Tommy Wallach plays “Bossy Kong.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“The Ladder, in terms of North American escape rooms, is definitely one of the top five most-anticipated games of the moment, propbably top two or three,” said David Spira, co-founder of Room Escape Artist, a website dedicated to the art of puzzle making. “It’s probably the most ambitious escape room I’ve seen, in terms of narrative.”
If all goes according to plan, wits will be tested but so will morals, as participants are graded on puzzle acumen as well as personal choices. Play ethically, corruptly or spend your time playing with the mini-golf-turned-shuffleboard floor in a middle-management office; the Ladder offers an abundance of choices, so many that it’s impossible to discover all its content in a single play-through. It’s ambitious, and it’s counting on guests to come for the puzzles, and stay for the story, almost aiming to be more akin to a real-life video game than a traditional escape room.
“We wanted to build something that basically would allow a group of 10 people to never stop doing something effective,” says Tommy Wallach, who co-founded Hatch Escapes with Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp.
Its puzzles and games are all optional. And before it begins, guests are likely to be given a warning: The Ladder’s puzzles are hard.
Then it’s time to turn a doorknob, which will trigger one of the Ladder’s multiple digital screens and ask groups to pick a character to portray — my team opted for a young hotshot of a narcissist who appeared eager to double-cross. We didn’t play true to his temperament, however, choosing often to toe the company line rather than align with any unsavory actors. Story moments, for which all games and puzzles will pause, are delivered via screens. Think of them as akin to video game cut scenes — that is, cinematic instances in which players can set down the controller.
We discovered hidden rooms — in one moment, a wall will essentially disappear to reveal a film noir-like scene involving a subplot with the FBI, albeit only if a group solves a particular puzzle — and tried our hand at a host of digitally enhanced games, some of which use lighting cues to remake a room. You’ll definitely want to approach the Ladder as if it’s a playable movie, as a 1950s mail room, for instance, is presented in black-and-white, playing tricks with color and grayscale. While we rose through the company ranks, our ending — there are multiple, as one doesn’t win or lose, per se — didn’t see us becoming the next billionaire; we lived a more solitary life, complete with a cat.
Designers Tommy Wallach and Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp at Douchie’s Bar, inside a ‘70s-themed room of the Ladder.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
After extended play-testing, the Ladder opened in early April. Wallach and Pettigrew-Rolapp are already in reflective mode. Each room (decade) features one core puzzle, which is directly tied to the narrative, as well as an abundance of mini-games. After about 15-20 minutes guests will move on, whether they solved the puzzle or not.
Did, Wallach and Pettigrew-Rolapp wonder, the team go too heavy on narrative? Will players follow the story line or opt to simply play games? And with so much to do in each decade, will guests want to come back to complete more, or will they feel overwhelmed?
“Our initial thought was that we’re trying to move this art form forward,” Wallach says. “We are doing that with this room, though not necessarily in exactly the way we thought we would. We thought we we’re going to try to get into more serious or better storytelling — more involved characters. I don’t think what’s the Ladder achieves. What it does achieve is trying to solve some other escape room problems. Replayability is one of them. Can we create something people want to come back to in the way people want to come back to Disneyland, because it’s not solved and done?”
It’s surprising to hear Wallach say the Ladder may not achieve all of its narrative goals. Storytelling, after all, is what helped build the Hatch Escapes reputation. In addition to Lab Rat, the company created the take-home “Mother of Frankenstein,” which is part novel and part puzzle tabletop game. Hatch is also home to the Scout Expedition-created exploratory, live-action game “The Nest,” a patient, interactive narrative in which participants discover one woman’s life story.
“When they came out with Lab Rat, it was the kind of game that across the country their reputation preceded them,” said Room Escape Artist’s Spira, who is based in New Jersey. “We knew we had to get back out to L.A. to play that game. It was pushing on a lot of boundaries that very few people were — they were pushing on narrative and building message into game play.”
While one could just play the Ladder and bypass a lot of the story, doing so would mean missing much of the nuance in the experience. Puzzles, for instance, build on one another, and characters in a switchboard game, which contains more than 100 cues, may appear later in another challenge — perhaps one in which a vintage computer coldly instructs us to decrease the corporation’s headcount. But the Ladder does raise an intriguing question: Do fans of puzzle games actually want more story?
Tommy Wallach demonstrates an escape room puzzle located in the Ladder.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
It is, admits Wallach, difficult to do. Guests who come to play, for instance, may not be primed to watch multiple videos advancing a plot.
“The canvas is so small. You have so little time to develop characters. Getting people to stop and listen to a story is almost impossible,” Wallach says. “I’m empathetic to it, but you can’t tell a better story unless you give me some room to tell you a story. That balance is harder than expected.”
And the Ladder is counting on players to want to experience a little story with the game play. Part of the reason it took five years to construct is that the Ladder is custom-built and cost more than $1 million to complete. It’s a premium escape room experience, with per-player costs typically ranging from $75 to $95, depending on the day. “Everything is bespoke,” says Pettigrew-Rolapp. “There is literally nothing off the shelf. The scale of what we’re trying to accomplish required that, and there are no experts in this. Every person who worked on this had to learn as they go, because nobody has done this before.”
It’s early days, but the Ladder is finding its audience. It has been largely selling out about two weeks in advance, at the time of writing. Wallach is optimistic and confident.
He believes the adventure will continue to sell out. “It needs to sell out, but it will,” he said. “I really do just think it will,” Wallach says. “We see maybe a tenth per week of what a Broadway theater sees in a day, and those tickets are $200 per person and not $95. But we’re going to need a couple good years before we’re like, ‘Everything is wonderful again.’ ”
Hatch is already garnering national attention for offering a boundary-pushing experience. It’s a winning start, and likely means that the only company being run into the ground is the fictional one at the heart of the Ladder.
Lifestyle
An eco-journalist takes on a Big Tech in this modern twist on the heist novel
George Orwell famously wrote that it takes a constant struggle to see what’s in front of one’s nose. That may be truer than ever. These days we barely register things that 20 years ago would’ve seemed downright bizarre — like people staring down at their phones in busy crosswalks. The unnatural comes to seem natural.
Until it doesn’t. This has happened with the proliferation of data centers all over America. After years of ignoring their mushrooming growth — there are over 4,000 in the U.S. — the public now sees them clearly and doesn’t like what they represent, be it soaring energy bills or the advent of job-killing AI. People now oppose having data centers in their communities. In real life — and in movies like Eddington — politicians are now pulled between their constituents’ desires and the devouring needs of Big Tech.
The hatred of data centers ignites the action in Cloudthief, a boisterous new novel that’s equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness. It was written by novelist Nathaniel Rich, who may be best known for ecological non-fiction such as his 2019 book Losing Earth. Setting his story back in 2014 — when tech billionaires were still considered visionaries, not bullying moguls — Cloudthief centers on a brainy young man who, like the guy in the Leonard Cohen song, is just some Joseph looking for a manger.
Our narrator “Tim” — a pseudonym he says — is a freelance writer who’s gone broke doing magazine articles about climate change. He’s lonely and lost until he stumbles upon Virginia (also not her real name), who could be the American cousin of dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander.

Tech-savvy and paranoid and scarily elusive, Virginia lives off the grid in a Manhattan mini-storage unit and has plans for a blow against Big Tech. Evidently, Tim has never seen a noir movie because he doesn’t merely fall for this 21st-century fantasy of a femme fatale, he dreamily goes along with her plans to rob a data center in Pryor, Okla., and make off with the sellable information their servers contain.
Once they drive off to Pryor — Rich describes their road trip wonderfully — Cloudthief kicks into high gear, serving up the juicy stuff that we all love in a heist story. We see the baroque planning. We watch them case their target, a silver-smoke spewing behemoth that has the majestic size of two futuristic airport terminals but is actually as tacky as a boondocks mini-mall.
And we learn how things work. While data centers contain the records of major corporations and government departments — each building contains tens of thousands of servers fat with documents — they’re protected by a smattering of minimum wage guards.
“Nobody knows about them,” Tim says of these gigantic repositories. “But they are the foundation of life on earth. … If every data center went dark tomorrow, we would be plunged into the Middle Ages.”
As Virginia and the lovestruck Tim prepare for the robbery, Cloudthief is a blast. They philosophize, have sex, don silly disguises, bristle with suspicion and constantly argue, often quite wittily — she’s aghast at his amateur mistakes that could get them caught. They often seem like teenagers playing at committing a crime. But commit it they do.
Of course, if you’ve ever read or watched a heist tale, you know that things never go as planned, and that the setup is more fun than the aftermath. And so it is here. But rather than spoil things, I’ll merely note that Rich’s ending earnestly tells us what we already know.
No matter. Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I’ve read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data-center nation — the blighting of the physical landscape, the voracious use of fossil-fuel energy, the way that these huge, bland buildings, owned by private companies like Google and Amazon, now house, and thereby control, nearly all aspects of all our lives.
Leading a life of garrulous desperation and powerless analysis — he’s the very soul of defeated idealism — Tim can kid himself into believing that robbing the Pyror data center might be a meaningful gesture. In fact, he’s just chasing a woman — and trying to escape his own thwarted life. But his blindness helps us see our world.
Early in the novel, Tim ruminates on “the Cloud,” a term whose vague innocence seduces us into not thinking about its power. “The goal of any technology,” he says, “is to make itself both essential and invisible, like air.” In Cloudthief, Rich does the opposite. He helps us see the actual, earthbound workings of the magical-sounding cloud, and he gets us thinking about the perils of our needing it so badly.
Lifestyle
Apache chef Nephi Craig says cooking Native food saved his life
Nephi Craig’s mother is White Mountain Apache and his father is Diné Navajo. He grew up on both reservations.
Ari Carter Craig/Penguin Random House
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Ari Carter Craig/Penguin Random House
Nephi Craig, the founder of the Native American Culinary Association, credits eating, cooking and teaching about Indigenous food with saving his life.
Craig became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After his first DUI, the judge gave him the option of three months’ probation if he agreed to get a job or go to college. That’s when he enrolled in cooking classes at Scottsdale Community College.
Craig says he initially felt like an “oddball” in the classes because he was unfamiliar with terms like “bistro” and “vichyssoise.” But he also credits the classes with igniting his interest in cooking — and teaching him more about Native foods, including the tomato.
“[When] I came across this info that [the tomato] was native to the Americas, it just brought this really big smile to my face,” Craig says. “As a Native American in Arizona, you don’t really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests.”
Craig eventually landed a job at one of Phoenix’s top fine dining restaurants, a goal he’d been working towards for years. But after a period of sobriety, a relapse ultimately cost him the job. He wound up in jail, where he worked in the kitchen and learned to design meals with whatever food was on hand.
“I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail, we call ourselves ‘chiefs,’” he says. “Banding together to feed, I think it was 7,800 inmates a day, was really eye-opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking.”
Over the years, Craig completed nine rehabs and ran away from five others. Now sober, he works as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the White Mountain Apache tribe-owned Rainbow Treatment Center in Whiteriver, Ariz., which serves people recovering from substance abuse. In 2021, he opened Café Gozhóó, a restaurant on the reservation that’s a place for the community to eat and talk. His new memoir is Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef.
Interview highlights
On the ubiquity of Native American food
For major American holidays like Thanksgiving, everyday staples like turkey, corn, squash and cranberries — those are all important Indigenous foods. And when people ask me what recipes or what ways do we prepare Native foods differently, or the question comes up, how come I haven’t heard of a Native American restaurant, or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I usually will say, “Well, you’ve been eating Native American foods and cuisine since as long as you can remember. It’s just that the stories are not told.”
All of American cuisine, every region in the United States is built on the landscapes or the ancestral terroir of Native American food and food traditions. So you can say Boston baked beans, barbecue in the American Southwest. … The hunting and fishing and agricultural bounty of the Northwest. All of these landscapes inform our diets as everyday Americans. So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it’s pretty straightforward and simple. We like to roast them, simmer them, turn them into pies just like everyone else sometimes. But Native foods have been there the whole time.
On why frybread isn’t Indigenous
It’s not an Indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy with us and when you study how foods were distributed once people were imprisoned, and foods that were distributed required a ration card, and you might get flour, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar. Ration lists varied from place to place, but they were pretty much always going to contain flour and lard, and so frybread emerges, some say in the Southwest. And there’s big debates about where and who did it first, but if you look across all of Native America from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has frybread as a result of military food rations and that grows into these food traditions that are a part of our reality today. I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility and food choices, not to take it away, but to be aware.
On working at Mary Elaine’s, a high-end French restaurant in Phoenix
That place really built me up into a very strong, young chef. I was an entremetier on the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and do all the garnishes. And I became the saucier and the guy that cooks the meat on the meat station. And to be in Arizona, a very meat and potatoes state, it was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was beautiful, best of everything. … So it really meant a lot to me. And when I lost that opportunity because of a relapse that crept in and took over, it was heartbreaking. I did not have the words to say it then, but it was a debilitating loss. That I took maybe five, 10, 15 years to process.
On selling his prized Japanese knives for alcohol
Addiction strips away everything slowly. It’s this terrible, terrible affliction that just causes you to devalue yourself and all of your belongings. … These knives were special because I had got them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven-course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel of Osaka. So I cherished these knives because they were like samurai swords. They were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai. And I brought them back to the States with me and I still have one of them with me, but I sold those other ones and it was terrible.
On experiencing sexual abuse as a kid
I included this part of my life not as the sole cause of addiction and dependency but a contributing factor. … I never told anyone about the sexual assault I encountered when I was 10 years old. I was just a little kid. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview is that no one’s going to believe me. So I just kept it in. And when I kept it, it festered and grew into this rage and anger and shame. And so when I talk about sexual abuse in my story, it’s not to point the finger at it, but I had to really take a long time to come to terms that I was a victim of that, and it doesn’t determine who I am.
On seeing a lot of alcohol addiction on Native reservations
As Indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism and colonialism differently. The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed and built by us. And as Native American peoples, we’ve inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it’s not that we are different biologically, it’s that we have a different legacy in encounters with colonial violence in America. That’s what I feel is one of the root causes of this multi-dimensional monster that is addiction.
On why he has a Mormon name (Nephi)
All my life, I always encounter these really big, complicated web of American history and our lifelines as Native American people. So how my family encounters organized religion and the LDS Church is when they were small, my dad is out in the Navajo Nation, there were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation, and the same thing in Whiteriver on the Apache rez. And so my parents were both placed on the placement program, which is where in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, young Native American kids were taken from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, anywhere there was a high population of Mormon families. And my parents were essentially raised in the Mormon church in a Mormon community till they graduated high school. And that’s a big part of our life. And so when the three of us, me and my brothers come, into the picture, they decide to name me Nephi. … It’s a lot of complicated elements in how identity forms and for me that’s one dimension of how it contributes to substance use but also freeing myself from it, too.
Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
Lifestyle
Trump relished in being compared to dictators like Hitler and Stalin, journalist says
A gold-colored item embossed with the word “President” sits on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 10, 2025.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first, and now second, term in office and the ongoing war with Iran. Swan says aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.”
“It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war [with Iran] has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought [it] would play out,” Swan says. “Trump is someone who is naturally given to hubris, but I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swan and his co-author Maggie Haberman spoke with more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unrestrained president remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways.

Swan notes that the president, who sat for an interview for the book, has been particularly fixated on becoming a “great man of history” during his second term. During one interview, Trump showed Swan and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
“[The list had] nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection. And Trump was relishing being in their company,” Swan says. “Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swan says the president’s fixation on power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in Trump’s White House decor, which leans on what Swan calls the president’s “inner Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” Sway says. “The history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Regime Change as “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things [Haberman] has written about me for so many years.”
Interview highlights
On how Trump’s second term differs from his first
This term is unrecognizable from term one. And I still think a lot of people view [this] administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn’t be more different. One of the ways in which it’s different is the team around him.
I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those types of people don’t exist anymore in this administration. …
At a senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
So that’s the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it’s created a situation where there’s very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might’ve just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth, with no filter, to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There’s almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it’s essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump [is] engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting sometimes joining, whether it’s a pro wrestler, or a crypto investor, or foreign somebody from a golf monarchy, or a CEO. …
The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
The conversations are non-linear. Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic and that can derail a meeting. We have a scene in the book where he’s having a conversation, a very small meeting, which is highly classified about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of country looking guy, and he’s holding stone samples for the Rose Garden … and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor. And before time’s up, the meeting’s ended, they haven’t actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve.
On the higher level of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
On Trump’s focus on decorating the White House

I traveled with President Trump to the Middle East, palace after palace. And it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Emirates. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth. And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House. … He’s building this grand ballroom. He seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom.
YouTube
On the challenge of interviewing Trump
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview… He’s an overwhelming presence and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can pick your moments.
I see my role in every interview as the representative of the people in that chair. You’re the one who’s lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the president of the United States. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you’re interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It’s the way he operates. … Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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