Journalist and podcast host Leon Neyfakh has spent much of the last few years unpacking the last half century’s worth of American political scandal—starting in 2017 with Slate’s Slow Burn and since last year with Fiasco on the subscription-based network Luminary. During that time he’s observed that there seems to be a strange kismet unleashed each time one of his series drops. It’s almost as if the podcast itself is conjuring invisible historical forces, as past disgraces and present realities coincide with astonishing specificity.
The first season of Slow Burn revisited Watergate and was released just as the Mueller investigation was ramping up. In that case the historical resonance was intentional. “We wanted to make clear that we were interested in how the experience of living through this political turmoil is constant from scandal to scandal,” said Neyfakh in an interview ahead of Fiasco’s new-season premiere on February 6. But he never could have predicted that the second season of Slow Burn, which centered on the Clinton impeachment, would enter the world just as the #MeToo movement was boiling over, forcing people to reevaluate how consensual a relationship could have possibly been between the leader of the free world and an intern. After Neyfakh left Slate to join Luminary, he focused the first season of his new podcast brand, Fiasco, on the 2000 election, delving into the 36-day Bush-vs.-Gore fight for the presidency, and how it permanently eroded political norms. It debuted right around the same time Donald Trump said he’d smiled when Kim Jong Un had called his newly announced 2020 political opponent, Joe Biden, a “Swampman” and “low IQ individual.” Trump had also started publicly pushing Kremlin conspiracy theories about Biden’s son Hunter.
On January 3—the day the news broke of the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani—Neyfakh had delivered the first episode of Fiasco’s new Iran-contra season to his team of engineers for mixing and mastering. When Neyfakh had decided on the topic back in 2018, he said “it felt like a natural next step, the big 20th-century not-quite-impeachment scandal.” But after U.S.-Iran relations became front-page news again this month, Neyfakh said he received a text from Luminary cofounder Matt Sacks, who joked, “How about if the next one is about world peace?”
Neyfakh said he generally avoids talking about parallels to current events on the podcast, preferring to allow audiences to make their own connections. For example, in the first season of Slow Burn, there’s a moment after Nixon, in an act of “radical transparency,” released the transcripts of the secret White House tapes, but then got caught having deleted critical material when the unedited tapes were leaked to the New York Times. Republican operative Pat Buchanan, who also pops up in Fiasco seasons one and two, went before reporters and told them that they should focus their efforts on the real story there: identifying and exposing nefarious leakers.
“The historical echo was so deafening, it felt like we were being coy not mentioning it,” Neyfakh said.
Season two of Fiasco untangles over the course of eight episodes the convoluted and largely forgotten 1980s scandal known as the Iran-contra affair, in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold weapons to Iran as part of a hostage-exchange deal, and used the proceeds to fund a war in Nicaragua. As Neyfakh describes it in the introduction, as an ’80s synth-pop score plays in the background, Iran-contra is essentially “the story of a secret war, a secret deal, and a scandal that threatened to destroy Ronald Reagan’s presidency—until it didn’t.”