What Shocked ‘Surrounded' Star Sam Seder Most About His MAGA Opponents
The Majority Report host Sam Seder has been a political commentator for more than two decades. But nothing he has done in his long career has brought him quite as much attention as a new video in which he was forced to debate 20 hardcore Donald Trump supporters one by one as part of Jubilee Media's increasingly popular 'Surrounded' series.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Seder breaks down the surreal experience of systematically schooling the shockingly young and diverse MAGA adherents on everything from Social Security to DEI to the prospect of a full-on American theocracy. He also has some choice words for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has taken a very different approach to engaging with the other side. Later, Seder talks about getting his start in political media at Air America, the current state of MSNBC, his long-running voice role on Bob's Burgers and the unexpected benefits of appearing on Sex and the City 25 years ago.
It was just after Trump won the 2024 election that Jubilee reached out to Seder about being at the center of one of their 'surrounded' videos. He was only 'vaguely aware' of the series and wasn't sure he wanted to do it at first, but when he mentioned the idea to his 19-year-old daughter, she told him, 'You've got to do that.'
Seder, 58, started to see the opportunity as a way to reach young people like his daughter with his progressive message about the vital importance of the government safety net. But he didn't realize until he walked into the giant warehouse in Los Angeles where they shoot the series that he would be making his argument directly to Trump voters who are less than half his age.
'I literally didn't know what I was walking into,' Seder says of the surreal experience, which took place just five days into the new Trump administration as L.A. was still on fire. He flew in from his home in New York for less than 24 hours and then mostly forgot about the whole thing until the 90-minute video dropped in mid-March and briefly took over social media.
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
I don't know how much preparation you did ahead of time, but even just when you walked into that room, how were you thinking about how you wanted to approach the situation?
Well, they allow you to choose the prompts, the contentions. So I had a notion of the broad strokes of things that we were going to be talking about. I've been doing this now for 20 years. I started in AM talk radio. So a lot of this stuff is stuff that I know. And I always go into these things somewhat prepared, but there's only so much you can prepare. And certainly there were responses that I got from them that I was simply not prepared to address. I was prepared for there to be more people there who were going to be able to engage on the substance of what I was talking about, and there was not a lot of that.
Was there a person or argument or moment that surprised you the most?
There were two. One of my contentions was, unless you're a billionaire, a religious fundamentalist, or a xenophobic nationalist, you made a mistake in voting for Donald Trump. And it did not occur to me that instead of someone saying, 'Hey, I'm not a billionaire, and I'm not a theocrat, and I'm not a white nationalist, but I care about X, Y or Z, like, I'm worried about inflation'—no one came and said that, instead, what happened was, someone came down and said, 'I am a Christian theocrat, and this is why Christian theocracy is better, because I have a moral foundation for my beliefs.' And it took me longer than I would have wanted to pivot to like, 'Well, let's hear your vision of America, after you get what you want.' And it was 'women subjugated by men,' I'm not paraphrasing. That was the part that was shocking to me. Women subjugated by men, no marriage equality, no marriage for fun, essentially no birth control. It turns out this guy, his avatar on Twitter is 'Women shouldn't vote.' It never occurred to me that someone's going to come and promote that in such a full-throated way. And then there was a woman who followed him who came and said, 'What's wrong with xenophobic nationalism?'
Yeah, that was quite a moment.
And I was like, oh, OK… I mean, it's healthy, I think, to have your assumptions questioned that way. I think one of the strengths of the country has been immigrants changing America and America changing immigrants. American identity has been evolving since day one. I think that's the strength of America. But I wasn't coming in feeling like, oh, I need to justify this. And I did need to.
Why do you think this format resonates with people so much?
I think it works because, one, it looks like the Roman Colosseum. It has that dynamic. It's dramatic in that way, and also you don't get bored because there are 20 different people who could jump in at any time. You don't know what you're going to get each time. And so I imagine that's why people find it entertaining and compelling. And I think in this particular instance, people were really just sort of surprised how assured these people were. And how, in many of those instances, completely and quite obviously totally wrong. That's an interesting combo.
It's interesting that this video came out right around the same time as Gavin Newsom's podcast, where he is interviewing the biggest names in MAGA, Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, in what seems like a very different way than what you were doing here. Do you feel like there is a right and wrong way to engage people who have these views?
From my perspective there is. And his is the wrong way. I think it's perfectly fine to go and have a conversation with people, and I think it's perfectly fine to share a platform and whatnot. But if I have a conversation with those people, there will be absolutely zero misunderstanding or ambiguity as to where I stand in relationship to them. And the only purpose for that engagement is to point out the flaws in their ideology. If you're doing a podcast with Steve Bannon so that you can have a beer with the guy afterwards, first of all, you're either lying or you're deluded. Because they are paid to create that division, they are paid to get an advantage that is going to help within their political project. And their political project ostensibly, is supposed to be much different than Gavin Newsom's.
And so, I'm not going to be friendly in that environment. I will be polite, but in no way does politeness require you to be chummy. And I think that's really unhealthy, because it understates the stakes that are going on in this situation. I mean, Charlie Kirk has said stuff on his program that, if he was on the left, Gavin Newsom would never sit with him because of how antisemitic it is. The idea that Jews have been historically sort of anti-white and that type of stuff—Gavin Newsom wouldn't be caught dead with anybody [on the left who said that]. But the amount of benefit of doubt is gross.
What do you think he's up to? Why do you think he's doing it?
I think as a political project for Newsom, he's from California. He is perceived as being a flaming liberal, and this is how he repositions himself. In the context of casting, if you play Doogie Howser for five years, and you're done with that show, the next part you take should be more sinister to show that you can play against type. That's what he's doing, and it's for his own political fortunes. But it is at the expense of, I think, our politics broadly.
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
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