Smart People Fall For The Cult Of Trump With Journalist Virginia Heffernan

From Richard Dawkins to Larry Summers, brilliant minds get pulled in.

I sat down with the journalist Virginia Heffernan for a recent conversation on Cults, Culture & Coercion to talk about who falls for the Trump cult and why. Virginia spent time inside a group of academics and intellectuals sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein, called Edge, run by literary agent John Brockman. She wrote about involvement in the Epstein cult for The New Republic. She told me she was fortunately kept at arm’s length from the worst of it.

“I was only there as a fig leaf because they didn't have any women,” she said. “They didn't want me at the parties or on the island.”

She watched the dynamics around her. Edge included Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president. The Epstein correspondence released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 documents a years-long stream of personal advice Summers sought from a convicted sex offender. In the messages, Summers asked Epstein for guidance on his pursuit of a younger woman he described as a mentee. Epstein called himself Summers' wing man and urged Summers to play the long game by keeping the woman in a forced holding pattern (Harvard Crimson, November 17, 2025).

Virginia framed it bluntly: “I would venture to say someone you would least expect to fall under a spell. These are grown men who should know better.”

Virginia writes the Magic and Loss Substack, hosts the Omni Shambles podcast, and contributes to The New Republic. The 10th anniversary of her book Magic and Loss has her circling back to a question she has carried since 2016. I thanked Virginia for reading my book and then being the first media person to bravely and publicly support what I wrote about. She wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed that it was the “best explanatory framework” for what was happening politically. She then went on CNN to be interviewed about it. This led to Brian Stelter interviewing me about my book for his CNN show Reliable Sources. She put it plainly: “I was trying to solve a problem in my mind, which was, how did we get here? And you came along with your book; The Cult of Trump and you did me the favor of giving me a framework.” This is a fascinating interview with a crack journalist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices