Is there any chance that Congress will not abandon Ukraine to the Russians? With Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans determined to cut off military aid to Ukraine, it’s looking grim. Yet there are glimmers of hope. Some Republicans are reportedly pushing a proposal that would offer aid to Ukraine as a loan. And there are signs that House Speaker Mike Johnson does want something to pass. We chatted with Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, who offered a keen understanding of the to...
Mar 20, 2024•29 min
This week, Donald Trump’s lawyers admitted that he’s failed to secure a bond to cover the half-a-billion-dollar penalty he faces in his civil fraud case in New York. As The New York Times delicately noted, “he does not have enough liquidity” to persuade any company to provide that bond. Translation: He doesn’t have the cash. This is humiliating to Trump, relative to his self-mythology. But it also points to his broader, largely-overlooked weaknesses in the 2024 campaign. We discussed this with T...
Mar 19, 2024•20 min
In Ohio over the weekend, Donald Trump delivered one of his most unhinged and dangerous rally speeches yet: He used appallingly dehumanizing language about migrants, saluted the Jan. 6 rioters as patriots and heroes, and predicted a “bloodbath” if he loses the election. We talked to New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser, the author of an excellent new piece about Trump’s use of violent and authoritarian language at rallies like this one, about why the media urgently needs to do better at conveyi...
Mar 18, 2024•27 min
On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gave an extraordinary speech lacerating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over the horrific civilian toll in Gaza. This is an important moment in U.S. politics: The highest ranking Jewish Democrat stood strongly for Palestinian rights at a time when the war in Gaza is badly dividing the Democratic coalition. To navigate these complexities, we talked to Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, which is promoting a peace e...
Mar 15, 2024•35 min
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has prominently argued that it’s premature to freak out about Donald Trump’s lead in the polls. Rosenberg’s case is partly that the Democratic Party is strong and has been winning lots of elections lately, as readers of his “Hopium Chronicles” well know. But there’s another, less-appreciated side to his analysis: That the people who make ads and run campaigns and do politics for a living know that Trump’s unfathomably high pile-up of negatives is, in the end...
Mar 14, 2024•37 min
This week, a group of prominent “Never Trump” Republicans and conservatives announced that they will spend $50 million to defeat Donald Trump this fall. The group, Republican Voters against Trump, hopes to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans who backed him in 2020 and might be persuaded not to in 2024. But how big is this pool of voters, and what’s the best way to reach them? We chatted with strategist Sarah Longwell, who runs the group and regularly conducts focus groups to figure o...
Mar 13, 2024•29 min
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a news analysis entitled, “The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same.” This has become a constant refrain in the press: One of the candidates is running on an explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the press keeps calling this a “rerun” of 2020, almost as if it’s all a sporting event. We chatted with Mark Jacob, a former veteran journalist who writes the “Stop the Presses” newsletter, about all the ins...
Mar 12, 2024•30 min
Have you heard of Bridget Ziegler? A co-founder of the far right Moms for Liberty, she is embroiled in a three-way sex scandal involving her husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler. Now some Florida parents are running brutal ads attacking her, even as the Moms for Liberty movement is unexpectedly losing ground everywhere. We chatted with journalist Jennifer Berkshire, the author of a forthcoming book on our cultural battles over education, who explained the bigger, deeper story here: The r...
Mar 11, 2024•25 min
This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. triggered an online explosion with a very weird defense of himself for spending time with Jeffrey Epstein. Everyone laughed, but we think this saga is revealing: It opens a window on his underappreciated appeal to disaffected young men. So we chatted with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a New School professor who specializes in politics and culture and has dissected the Kennedy phenomenon in surprising ways. Petrzela helped us uncover the darker undercurrents driving K...
Mar 08, 2024•23 min
Texas is a state that keeps breaking the hearts of Democrats everywhere. But hopes are rising again this week, after Representative Colin Allred, a former NFL player and civil rights lawyer, captured the Democratic nomination to unseat Senator Ted Cruz. Six years after Beto O’Rourke fell three points short of beating Cruz, what will be different this time? We chatted with Allred about his path forward, how Democrats can compete in rural America, and why Republicans have turned the border into a ...
Mar 07, 2024•26 min
Earlier this week, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico signed a handful of gun control bills in the face of a terrible spate of gun violence in her state that has drawn national attention. Lujan Grisham is smack in the middle of some big trends in our politics right now: The transformation of the southwest, the success of Democrats in border states, and the rise of the female Democratic governor in the era of Donald Trump. We chatted with Lujan Grisham about all these things—and a whol...
Mar 06, 2024•27 min
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to zero that Donald Trump will not be disqualified from appearing on the ballot in Colorado, despite having engaged in insurrection. Coupled with the court’s willingness to hear Trump’s demand for full immunity from prosecution for insurrection-related crimes, all this raises serious questions about whether it is functionally placing Trump beyond accountability. We chatted with New Republic writer Matt Ford, author of a new piece eviscerating the court’s late...
Mar 05, 2024•26 min
With Donald Trump set to host Viktor Orban at his Mar-a-Lago retreat this week, it's time to get serious about the rise of the global far right and why its worldview poses such a dire threat. This week, Donald Trump will host Hungarian leader Viktor Orban at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Meanwhile, Congress is on the verge of abandoning Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. Trump’s romance with Orban—and the opposition of MAGA Republicans to helping Ukraine—are part of the same story, in which the American right ...
Mar 04, 2024•28 min
This week, former MSNBC journalist Mehdi Hasan launched a new digital media company called “Zeteo,” which is Greek for “to seek.” Hasan intends this as an answer to the failings of the mainstream media, which he says is enabling Donald Trump’s effort to “usher in a new era of fascism in the United States.” We chatted with Hasan about his new project’s goals, his belief that the conventions of political reporting are failing to meet this moment, and why the far-right information space is flourish...
Mar 01, 2024•27 min
The news that Mitch McConnell will step down as GOP senate leader later this year has led many to argue that he was fundamentally a foe of Donald Trump who is no longer welcome in the party of MAGA. But the story is more complicated than that: In crucial ways, McConnell’s own career trajectory helped bring about the descent of our politics into its current disastrous mess. We chatted with Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, who was among the first to identify McConnell as key to the GOP slide...
Feb 29, 2024•32 min
In recent days we’ve learned that Stephen Miller is drawing up plans for a shockingly cruel second-term immigration agenda, complete with mass deportations and huge detention camps. Meanwhile, President Biden is set to visit the southern border—and is mulling a new asylum crackdown of his own. We chatted with Jason Houser, a former senior official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Biden, who explained how operationally absurd Miller’s fantasies truly are—and why new asylum restri...
Feb 28, 2024•26 min
Donald Trump’s victory over Nikki Haley in the South Carolina GOP primary has sparked another round of punditry about his supposed political dominance. Yet the primaries have revealed his weaknesses with independents, and he clearly fears his legal travails are a major liability that will get worse. So what if Trump is weaker than he appears? We chatted about this with political scientist Julia Azari, co-author of a new piece arguing that the long shadow of his 2016 victory is still badly distor...
Feb 27, 2024•28 min
For the first time in months, a pair of new polls has found that election-denier Kari Lake is trailing in the Arizona Senate race to the Democratic candidate, Representative Ruben Gallego. But she remains a MAGA celebrity phenomenon who cannot be counted out, making this race highly unpredictable with Independent Sinema Kyrsten Sinema also in the mix. So we chatted with Gallego about how he hopes to defeat Lake and Sinema, why Democrats should level with voters about the border, and what’s reall...
Feb 26, 2024•32 min
Fox News and other right wing media are currently engaged in absurdities that are as bad as anything they’ve attempted in recent memory. They are struggling to spin away everything from the collapse of an informant’s claims about President Biden to the GOP’s killing of a border security deal that Republicans themselves demanded. Yet in a darker sense, right wing media is also flourishing. We talked to Matt Gertz of Media Matters, who helped us unravel the tangled web those sources are weaving. L...
Feb 23, 2024•35 min
It’s the question that won’t die among D.C. elites: Should President Biden step aside so another Democrat can run instead? Democrats have engaged in some remarkably public handwringing about Biden’s age that just won’t let up. One Democrat who has insistently sounded the alarm is veteran strategist David Axelrod. So we invited him on the show, where he allowed that an alternative is unlikely—while explaining how Biden can address the issue and why he’s still the favorite against Donald Trump. Le...
Feb 22, 2024•31 min
This week, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers signed a new set of maps for legislative districts in the state—an important and overlooked victory that came after a long struggle dating back well over a decade. We talked to Greta Neubauer, the 32-year-old Minority Leader of Wisconsin Assembly Democrats, who explained what Democrats did to prevail, why this was such a significant achievement, and how it shows that reviving democracy is a grueling game of inches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ...
Feb 21, 2024•27 min
The stunning news that Donald Trump has been hit by a $355 million penalty in his civil fraud case in New York deals a big blow to his mystique as master of “the deal.” But Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling also exposes a deeper undercurrent of scamming that Trump has been surfing on for decades and hopes to ride right back into the White House. We chatted with journalist David Cay Johnston, author of a new piece in The New Republic about the ruling, who helped us plumb the depths of the dark etho...
Feb 20, 2024•24 min
This week, Donald Trump announced that he wants Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel replaced with a loyalist: Michael Whatley, the head of the North Carolina Republican Party. Behind the jockeying looms a very big story: The Trump-MAGA takeover of the GOP, and the challenges the party faces as it nominates someone facing multiple criminal indictments. We talked to Marc Caputo, a reporter for The Bulwark and author of a great new piece on McDaniel’s ouster, who helped us unravel th...
Feb 16, 2024•31 min
Earlier this week, Democrats executed a remarkable 8-point win in a special House election in suburban Long Island, a race that was all about immigration. Republicans ran millions of dollars in ads on the issue, yet Democrat Tom Suozzi prevailed, flipping the seat of disgraced Republican George Santos. What on earth really happened here? We talked to Mike Bocian, the chief Democratic pollster on this race, who offered a fascinating and detailed glimpse into how his party pulled it off. Learn mor...
Feb 15, 2024•28 min
On Tuesday, in a decisive 70 to 29 vote, the Senate passed a mammoth bill containing $60 billion for Ukraine’s self defense against Russian aggression, as well as $14 billion for Israel. Yet House Speaker Mike Johnson is vowing that the House won’t vote on the measure, in part because MAGA hard-liners are raging against it. We talked to Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado about what’s really driving the opposition, how Democrats can try to get around it with a “discharge petition,” and...
Feb 14, 2024•23 min
This week, the freakout among Democrats about President Biden reached its shrillest pitch yet, after a special counsel report exonerated Biden but included combustible claims about Biden’s mental capacities. While many Democrats redoubled calls for the party to entertain alternatives to nominating Biden, confusion and disagreement reigns among them about what precisely to take away from this moment. We talked to Brian Beutler, who regularly criticizes the Democratic Party’s approach to politics ...
Feb 13, 2024•38 min
Elon Musk has unleashed numerous tweets lately boosting far right personalities and endorsing MAGA tropes holding that migration constitutes a deliberately engineered invasion. He even endorsed a version of “white genocide theory.” Along with his elevation of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, it all amounts to a genuine ideology: Reactionary tech authoritarianism. We discussed this with Gil Duran, author of a New Republic piece called “The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming...
Feb 12, 2024•30 min
With Nikki Haley set to make a last stand of sorts in the South Carolina primary later this month, there’s a hidden reason that Donald Trump has been so dominant throughout the GOP nomination process: White evangelicals. Their support for Trump has held through impeachments, scandals, revelations about sexual assault, multiple serious criminal prosecutions, and even an insurrection attempt. We talked to Sarah Posner, a scholar of the religious right, about Trump’s extraordinary hold on these vot...
Feb 09, 2024•41 min
In an extraordinary spectacle, virtually all Senate Republicans joined together Wednesday to block a bipartisan bill that would have given Republicans much of what they wanted on border security. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to. We talked to Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who conferred with Republicans throughout this process. He opened up about what Republicans said behind closed doors, noting that they privately admitted that this bill was “aligned with their view of wha...
Feb 08, 2024•31 min
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court ruled that Donald Trump is not immune from criminal charges stemming from his effort to steal the 2020 election. With Trump expected to take this to the Supreme Court, how will the timeline of his insurrection-related trial dovetail with the presidential election? We talked to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade about all the possible scenarios—including one that backfires spectacularly on none other than the Republican Party’s own voters. Learn more abo...
Feb 07, 2024•27 min
