Before Mike Daisey became briefly but intensely notorious for his show about Steve Jobs a few years back, he made a name for himself as a solo performer, doing what you might call moral inventories of thorny subjects and complex humans via comedic monologues. (He also happens to be a Seattle theater and comedy veteran, who performed in at least two of the best shows I ever saw here, not for nothing.)

Tonight, he brings The Trump Card (8pm at the Neptune, $25), about—guess who!—the worst bastard currently running for president of the United States. Because I, like you, cannot stop thinking about Trump, I'm eager to see Daisey fulminate on the subject tonight. Because I, like you, also can't stop talking about Trump, I interviewed Daisey by phone to ask about the show. A partial excerpt of our Q&A is below. The full text ran to 9000 words. If you fuckers don't get serious and vote for HRC, I may just run the entire unedited text on this blog every day for the next four years. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

So, uh... any particular reason why Donald Trump should be on your mind of late?

When I started working on the show, when I first started doing research on it, it was about 14 months ago, and so Trump was not yet in the presidential race, but it was rumored every day that he was going to be in it, but that’s been true for a number of electoral cycles. In fact, somebody just gave me the recent Doonesbury anthology that’s all about Trump, and one of the very first strips is actually about gossip and rumors that Trump will be in the presidential race in, like, 1987.

It’s amazing to think about how long his reach actually is because there’s a tendency to think of him as the transient phenomenon, but actually that’s tied to why I became interested in him, because I started really thinking about the fact that here is a man who’s been famous pretty much exclusively for being rich and for being rich alone, and not actually for doing anything in particular while being rich. He’s not even a shipping magnate or a Bill Gates. Really just for the act of being rich, since I was a child. My entire life, I’ve known who Donald Trump is. I thought about how fucked up that was. It’s actually very strange.

I have a track record of talking about people who are megalomaniacs in different ways, and so I actually thought, “Oh, he’d be perfect. He’s interesting,” so I started really researching him. At the time, when I started, I thought he would run and then that would end, and then that would be an interesting anecdote that would tie up the end of one of the threads of the show. I didn’t actually anticipate where we actually ended up going.

Nor, I think it’s safe to say, did he, or anyone. What’s most front and center about the Trump thing is that it started as a folly, a stunt, and the nature of reality has changed so much that it became plausible as it went along. For anyone who has been alive more than 30 years, his ascent seems impossible, right?

Right. Of course, that cognitive dissonance was a large part of the success of it. There’s a book that was very popular after the 2012 election, very popular inside the Beltway, one of those books that no actual humans read, but that people in Washington were all reading, called The Party Decides. Basically, it’s a book dedicated to the proposition that the way the electoral politics are built in America, the party always decides. It seems like there are rebels and rebellions, but they aren’t real, and actually, at the end of the day, the party makes all the decisions, and you can count on that.

It’s very funny because it’s now really clear that this book was not only wrong, it was catastrophically immediately wrong, and it’s one of those cases where people are writing a book that is soothing to them because they’re facing a collision. Their way of life is altering in front of them, and so this book is actually a defense of the way things have been, not a predictor of the way things are going to be.

One of the things that, when I talked a lot to different political journalists as I was working on the show, especially as it became increasingly clear that the show was actually going to be about the election in relationship to Trump’s biography, that it was actually going to be a show about this moment, one of the things that came up a lot is the idea that the whole concept actually relies on a simple fact. It may be true that the party has the power to decide how things will be, but the party would have to actually make that decision.

In many ways, the Republican party was so paralyzed by its own identity crisis that it could not make a decision that it did not want Trump. Instead, it was paralyzed by fighting off Ted Cruz, the forces that were running the Republican party had already decided to back Jeb, and they were paralyzed by the fact that that wasn’t working. Since nothing they were doing functioned, no one actually mounted an effective defense. In many ways, it was sort of a default win. It was like everyone else disqualified themselves.

We can’t discount the fact that Trump was really good at running that primary campaign. The same way he is terrible, literally possibly the worst person I’ve ever witnessed in this general election, he was amazing in that primary, and personally executed a number of his opponents. He is responsible in large part for Jeb—this whole low energy thing. He totally coined that and hung it around his neck and executed him.

He obviously put on a better show. In a way, whatever the party’s plans were, it was clear pretty quickly that their favorite but also their alternates were all just not good at all. You don’t even have to be that good. You can be not that good and still be fine in politics, if you’re a Republican presidential candidate. Mitt Romney was never that good.

No.

George W Bush was never that good. He had certain qualities that are now, in the age of Trump, beginning to seem a lot more desirable. But these guys were uniformly terrible, not remotely plausible.

Yes. I actually in the show often refer to them as 15 of the weakest candidates the Republicans have ever assembled. How do I usually put it? I say a reverse Marvel shared universe of superheroes with awful powers, this large collection of second-rate people that make Ant-Man look good, really just terrible, just all with one power and it’s not good. Yeah, no, that was a big part of it. Ben Carson was a big part of it. He was an absurd candidate who was polling pretty well, but they always have at least one or two ringers who poll really well and everyone knows is not going anywhere.

What was interesting this time is that Trump, in the early part of his campaign, basically hid behind Ben Carson, because Ben Carson was already in the race, polling surprisingly well. So was Trump. Ben Carson had his own books to promote. So did Trump. He sidled up to Ben Carson so that people looking out for what’s disruptive had a tendency to group those two together and be like, “Well, there’s Ben Carson. Who knows why the fuck that guy’s in the campaign? Oh, and there’s Trump. Well, I guess there’s both of them, but we don’t know why the fuck either of them are in the campaign.” These things were very effective at letting him stay in the game long enough to start knocking people off, which makes sense.

One of the points I make in the show is that number of candidates, about 15, is actually the number of people you have in any standard reality TV show where people have to compete every week. It was funny because journalists and commentators were often saying, throughout all the Republican debates, they would say, “It’s like reality TV.” I was like, “It’s not like reality TV. It is reality TV.” The guy who actually pioneered one of the best incarnations of the modern form is probably going to do well, especially since he is already famous. I think that’s one of the areas where he actually disrupted the campaign very effectively.

People are throwing around the word “revolution” with regard to this particular election. The Bernie Sanders campaign threw that word around a lot, but it’s clear to me that Trump is the revolution in this election, which is strong evidence that revolution might be the wrong model for people to be advocating.

I think that’s probably true. I think people get a little hung up on ... I’m not saying that you are in the way you’re discussing it here, but I do think people sometimes get hung up on this idea that we can’t use the word “revolution” unless people are being shot in the streets and the palaces are being occupied. The whole idea of revolution is always a metaphor, just sometimes a very literal metaphor because they are being shot in the streets.

When I think of with Trump, I think of disruption. I think somebody walked in who is a performer, fundamentally, and obeys the rules that performers obey, like I do, and is surrounded by politicians, who are bound by their politician code and their own concern at saying the wrong thing. They just, as a consequence, are very fluid at speaking. They don’t sound very human. They sound canned, robotic. Not because they’re terrible people, because the form of their performance has that shape.

He doesn’t have any of these restrictions. One of the things that’s amazing about following Donald Trump closely—people always think that following closely means hearing him lie a lot, but what’s really remarkable is actually not that. Politicians often lie. What’s really remarkable is how often he tells the truth. Donald Trump’s the only guy who will tell you that he has no idea what he’s talking about. He’ll say something, someone will challenge him on it, he’ll never apologize for it, but he’ll often revise what he just said two or three different times, or switch to, “Well you know, we don’t know. People don’t know and we should find that out.” He often does that.

He’s just basically telling you, “I said a thing, but when I said it, you don’t have to take it as seriously because it’s me that’s saying it. Just take it like I’m saying it,” which is the essence of a performer. He’s performing the role of Donald Trump, who we the electorate, especially, have gotten used to listening for many years, so we hear him with that kind of authority, namely an authority that is the opposite of an objective authority. Instead, whenever we hear him say something we think, “There’s Donald Trump saying something,” which is what accounts in part for the polling that has made journalists crazy, where they poll people and they’re like, “Donald Trump lies a lot. Does it bother you?” And people are like, “No, not very much.”

It makes journalists crazy, but it’s partly because they don’t expect him to speak literally true things. Now, should someone who does that, who’s a performer, be running for the president of the United States? That’s a separate issue. I would say probably not, but that’s the form of his modality. The problem is not that the public is not smart. Actually, the public’s actually listened to in a very savvy way. It’s just that their savviness is not congruent with what policy makers would like.

What they are is saying, “This is a show and I’m entertained. I’m entertained by this man saying these crazy things.” Then policy makers would say, “Well, I’m scared to death. He actually will have real power,” and many people, I think especially from disaffected areas of the country, say, “Will he? Because nothing ever changes for us and things feel like they’ve been screwed for so long. I don’t know, does it actually matter who’s president? I’m not sure.” I think that’s part of the disconnect.

The frightening thing about what you identified as his willingness to say, “I don’t know what I’m talking about”: That’s a rhetorical trick designed to seduce people’s lowest impulses.

It’s an old performance trick. It’s a good one too. What’s best about it is it’s one that no politician currently plays very often. No one he’s running against makes this bid. It’s a bid to take on lower status. He actually, for a guy who brags all the time, he is not afraid to make low status decisions in his performances. He’ll say things like, “Folks, I don’t know. I’m just a guy talking to you. I’m just saying things,” and part of it is that then that actually has the effect, and he knows this, that it makes him look self-assured because he’s willing to look foolish, whereas most politicians are definitely afraid of doing that.

Very few are willing to speak that way, including the fact that the entire armature of being a politician is often built on this idea of respectability. You can never reveal that you don’t have an opinion about something or you don’t know something because that becomes tantamount to a gaffe [Note: This conversation was two weeks before Gary Johnson’s “What’s Aleppo?”], God forbid there’s a gaffe. Then that immediately becomes the entire story. You have to be hyper-competent in everything, and he does not feel that pressure.

It’s a particular gift of the performer to actually be like, “I’m going to admit to you that I’m talking out of my ass right in front of you, but while I do that I’m also going to lie to you about something.” One of the things I talk about in the show a lot, and I honestly feel like is something that Trump learned from his time with Roy Cohn, is the ability to build the best kind of lies, the most effective lies I should say, which is to take something that’s really deeply true, provocatively true, and use that as the core, and then you pack around it deceit so it becomes a kind of weapon, because those things have the ability to penetrate much more deeply.

What’s an example of that?

The classic largest ones are lies that are so tremendous that they become part of the architecture of our whole world. That’d be like, “Where are those weapons of mass destruction?” And, “I thought those banks were too big to fail.” These things become so large that then the lie itself has percolated all the way through. On point by point analysis, people are like, “Well, but there really were no weapons of mass destruction. If that’s true, then this is true,” and then if you backtrack, you’re like, “There’s no reason that this thing has happened,” and yet it has.

In the case of Trump, an example I talk about in the show that I often talk about, that I use with the audience is this very provocative moment in the Republican debates when Jeb was talking about some garbage and he’s blathering, and then he ends this whole section by saying, “Blah blah this, blah blah that, and my brother, who kept us safe.” Of all people, it was Donald Trump on the Republican stage who said, “Your brother didn’t keep us safe. 9/11 happened when your brother was president.”

That moment had such intense cognitive dissonance because it is central Republican orthodoxy today that we never talk about who was president on 9/11 ever.

I bring it up because that’s a great example of Trump saying something really provocative that the people in the room do not want to hear, and it has this effect of shaking them up so then when they say other things, you tend to take him more seriously. Similarly, in the Republican debates—everyone’s talking about how much they can cut Obamacare into pieces, basically having contests to see who can say the most brutal thing, and it was actually Trump who was like, “We’re not going to let people die in the streets. This is America.” He abruptly out of nowhere said something deeply decent, was just like, “No, we’re not going to do that.”

He didn’t do it because he’s such a heartfelt guy, he did it because his performer instinct tells him, “That’s the provocative thing to say. That’s the thing.” He can feel it. He can feel that that’s the thing that would elicit the largest reaction. That’s the thing they’re most not prepared to hear. It’s not because he’s smart. He’s not smart at all. He’s just very good at performing. I’m very good at performing too, and I find that you can just hear them.

He’s shrewd.

He’s very shrewd in that way. He’s quite good at performing even if he’s also not very bright. He tends to make terrible tactical decisions, but when he’s allowed to just function on his instinct—the best situation was these Republican debates. Multiple opponents, unlimited camera time, room to bluster whenever wanted, but then give away focus when he doesn’t want it again. In that situation he’s king.

Since you frame him in terms of performance, isn’t it harder to play ignorance if you are concerned that everyone needs to know how smart you are? What do you make of his famous fragile ego and narcissism?

When I work on shows like this, I do a lot of research, and I rarely have an opportunity to have as much material because I’ve never done a show about someone who then is the center of the national spotlight. There were more biographies of Donald Trump even before the campaign started than there were about L. Rob Hubbard, or even Steve Jobs, and there’s all the data came from the campaign, and then on top of that, I have all the people who volunteered to talk to me.

I live in New York, I have plenty of people like, “I know Donald Trump. I met him at this time, I did deals with him in Atlantic City. Come talk to me.” I’ve talked to all these people who know Donald Trump in different contexts. Honestly, I think that you’re talking about someone…

I want to make one thing clear, which is that I feel very strongly that the myth of authenticity is just that: a myth. In a very real sense, it does not matter who Donald Trump actually is. It just doesn’t actually matter because we are not electing Donald Trump the private person or Donald Trump, what kind of poetry does he write in his secret heart? We’re actually electing someone who runs the country, and so I’ve always felt the way to assess public figures is you assess them on what they publicly do. Goes for artists as well. We cannot actually know what is going on inside of these people.

Having said all that, I think he’s a sociopathic blank. I think he’s blank of affect. If there’s one thing that’s overwhelmingly come up again and again in all the research about him is how barren his interior life seems to be. There is no indication that he ever has read books. There’s no indication that he even has favorite TV shows or movies. There is no indication of any taste beyond the Trumpian taste that I talk about in the show and I dissect as the aesthetic of “super classy.” Other than that aesthetic that we all make fun of, there’s no other indications of a personal aesthetic. There’s no indication of a personal life.

I’m really familiar, in a small way, with what Trump does. I am a person named Michael Daisey, and then I play a character named Mike Daisey onstage. There’s strong correspondences between those two people, and in fact, in many ways I’m actually trying for it to be as authentic as possible while at the same time recognizing that there’s no such thing as something that’s authentic. I’m just telling you, as someone who’s lived in that duality for some time, even on a small, small scale, the lack of interior life just based on all the accounts of all the people who write about him, who have known him, there’s no account.

I’ve read four biographies and countless articles, and I don’t have one example of someone talking about an intimate moment with Donald Trump. Not one. I don’t like to throw around the term “narcissist” because I think it’s become painfully overused right now, probably because we invented social media and we realized that everyone has a strong narcissist quality, so when we’re allowed to publish, we all actually do.

I’ve actually noticed that in my work. Just a few years ago, go back just 6 or 7 years, 8 years, every interview, every major interview would have part of it where someone would ask me, and these are intelligent interviews, someone would ask me the equivalent of, “You talk about yourself onstage. You talk about your life. You talk to people and you tell them about your life as though it matters. Why does your life matter? How do you have the ...”

I had to be like, “Well, I think lives actually matter. My story is my own and so I tell it this way, and I try to talk about different thing.” But a fundamental question that would spring forward was the idea of, “Why do you get to talk about your life in public? What a strange idea.”

Right. Who do you think you are?

Oh yeah. Who do you think you are? Often, people would accompany it with, and they’re being nice to me, these aren’t aggressive questions, they would accompany it with, “Um, why do you do this? Is it hard for you, is it strange to be such a needy person?” I would always assert that, it doesn’t work that way, and actually all humans have stories. If anything, we need to tell more stories.

What’s really fascinating is that question is gone now. No one asks me that question. I haven’t been asked that question in five years, and nothing’s changed with me. What’s changed is the culture, actually. I think with the rise of social media, we’ve all realized that we have a lot of narcissism in us and it’s more apparent, and you can see everyone else’s narcissism.

This thing we used to call narcissism, we’ve had to rectify because of course what we called narcissism was also partly puritanism—as in it’s embarrassing for people to act as though their lives have value. People are busy reconciling those things.

That’s a long aside. While that term gets thrown around a lot, I really think he might deserve it. If anybody actually can hold the heavyweight title of narcissism, it really might be, like, of course it’s Donald Trump. But really, he might actually be the very best narcissist I’ve ever even imagined. Because there are narcissists who aren’t sociopathic blanks. There are narcissists who have very rich interior lives. I actually think he’s very narcissistic but also, you pierce him, it’s like a howling blankness.