In the introduction to your new book, you say reading your old work is the ‘worst kind of time machine.’ Is it that awful, looking back at these pieces?

Yes, because I’m just compelled to want to rewrite everything I’ve ever written. My dream life would have been if I could have written my first book forever and never have it come out … but be rich. Every time I go back and I read something that I’ve written before, I see things that could have been different.

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What do you think has aged well?

Sometimes you accidentally say something that becomes meaningful, even though that wasn’t the original intent. There’s an essay in there about Tim Tebow, and at one point I’m writing about the 2012 election, and Obama running against at the time whoever he would face, the unknown candidate. And I pose this hypothetical about a candidate who comes forward and has no plan, and basically just tells people to have faith in him. I framed it and set it up as an implausible, irrational scenario – and that actually happened four years later! That was cool. All the times I tried to be smart, here I am actually being right one time because I wasn’t trying.

You’ve said before that sport has become the most exciting form of TV because it has an unknown outcome. After Brexit and Trump, has politics started to give it a run for its money?

It certainly feels that way in the wake of Brexit and the wake of Trump. Those are the two events where there was just this disbelief over the fact that for many years it did not seem like these were the kind of things it was possible for us to be wrong about. Every previous election in my memory, the outcome reflected what the suspicion would be.

Do you think that politics will remain as unpredictable?

My dream life would have been if I could have written my first book forever and never have it come out … but be rich

It could signal a pretty massive change in the way people are perceiving the world, but what I think is more likely is that the chasm between the media and the consumer is greater. There’s always been a gap between the way the media and journalists see the world and the average person views the world, but that gap has increased. Going into the election, you would hear people say, ‘Oh you know Hillary Clinton’s approval rating is 36% and Trump’s approval rating is 31%, so regardless of who is elected, we’re going to have the least popular president ever’. The thing that they often overlooked was that the approval rating of the media was in the low 20s or in the teens – almost no one seemed to have a positive perception of the media as an abstraction.

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Are you shocked that Trump won despite the polling and predictions?

There was no way that you could have expected this. If someone would have told me that at some point there’s going to be a presidential candidate that all the major news organisations are going to see as an enemy and that would have helped the individual – it would have seemed implausible. But now it’s very clear that that’s what happened.

What do you think triggered this breakdown in trust?

It comes from the 90s. When Fox News emerged and was followed by MSNBC, there was suddenly this realization that people actually preferred non-objective news sources. There was this idea for a long time that objectivity is impossible, because we’re not robots, which led some people to say, well, let’s totally give up on it entirely. The way I always perceived of being a journalist is that you were supposed to be hyper-aware of your biases and then compensate for them. That was the whole idea. But once there was this idea that what people actually want is news that reaffirms their pre-existing view of the world – the idea that it was a meaningful source of information evaporated. It was seen now as personality-branded, and your interest in the news was just an extension of who you are.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pop culture is political: Get Out. Photograph: 2017 Universal Studios. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Has politics bled into pop culture completely now?

The idea that everything is politics now, the question is, to me at least, is this a trend, or just the way things are going to be? Because certainly right now, you can’t think or write about anything without putting it in some sort of political context. Doesn’t matter if it’s film, sports, whatever the thing is – you always need to place it in a sphere or what its secondary political meaning is. I sometimes think that this is just the politics of the moment, and maybe in 10 years people will go and look back at the popular culture from this period and almost experience it for the first time. Instead of looking at a film like Get Out as a political extension, they’ll look at it just as a horror film, or instead of a Beyoncé record as having something to do with intersectionality feminism, they might just look at it as music.

Why do you think that political angle has become unavoidable?

To review a film like that simply as cinema would guarantee no audience interest. It’s not even that they don’t want it, they would be mad about it. They would see it as a kind of apolitical stance by omission. That you were forging a political idea by refusing to acknowledge it. There’s always been a aspect of that. The Village Voice would always review film and music through a political lens. There were certain publications that were built around that idea: that everything is politics. But they were always alternative ways to think about this. Now it’s the standard way, and I think that’s what is discomforting to some people.

Why do you think that so much pop culture is being written about in the context of Trump?

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Trump began as a pop-culture figure. He began his career as an element of business, but really as an element of popular culture. So it’s not surprising in a way that he is so much of a pop-culture president. I suppose Obama was as well, but not as stridently. In the moment, the Trump administration does have this sense of this completely unforeseen potential cataclysm, and if that proves out to be true it will be this defining moment of the century, but there’s also the chance that he will just be seen as a bad president, and then people will move on. And then art from this period will be seen as related to him, but not essential.

The interviews with Jimmy Page and Taylor Swift are so different – she seems to relish it, he seems to loathe every minute. What do you make of stars like Beyoncé and Drake shunning conventional interviews?

Celebrities at that level provide people with different things. Beyoncé does not have to give interviews because her fanbase wants to believe whatever they want about her; they don’t need her to say anything. Taylor Swift is different because it seems as though her appeal is built around the deconstruction of what she does, and she needs to talk in order for that to happen. Led Zeppelin is a totally different world. You couldn’t see [Jimmy Page] unless you bought a magazine with a photograph of him in it or he came to your town once, or you saw Song Remains the Same once in theaters or something. It wasn’t that the work was more musical, but the appreciation was more musical because the music was all that you had, and everything else had to be imagined.

Chuck Klosterman’s X is out now