Tim Miller's response to Ezra Klein: chef's kiss

As a former English teacher and professional writer, allow me to provide my 2 cents on Tim's response.

1) content: fully agreed, no notes. Unconscientiousness isn't great, but it doesn't explain why Trump is a fascist. To get to fascism you also need narcissism. Furthermore, my own added note on the amateur psychology is that a lot of Trump's behavior evinces disgust/disorder aversion, which is actually strongly correlated with conscientiousness. Trump is both uninhibited AND fastidious. He evinces two opposite extremes of conscientiousness. The narcissism angle explains his behavior much better.

2) style: this is where Tim really knocks it out of the park. He gave as much relevant content and a more cogent argument in 5 minutes than Ezra managed in 40. When I first listened to Ezra's essay, I thought to myself 'this is a decent point, but it could have been made in 10 minutes, why is he dragging it out to 40? Tim proved it could have been made even faster than that. Where's Ezra's editor? When I was writing books, if I wrote like that my editor would have asked me if I was getting paid by the word before the third page.

Kudos Tim, you knocked it out of the park. And thanks for respecting our time, as always.