This week I published an audio essay about what I think is unique about Donald Trump as a personality and political figure and the dangers he poses if he gets a second term in the White House. But I wanted to go deeper on this topic with someone who knows him much better than I do. Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent for The New York Times and has traced his evolution over the decades in her 2022 book, “ Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America .” In...
Oct 25, 2024•1 hr
I think there’s an answer. But it’s not age — or, at least, it’s not just age. Mentioned: “ White House aides lean on delays and distraction to manage Trump ” by Josh Dawsey “ I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ” by Miles Taylor “ What JD Vance Believes ” by Ross Douthat Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast . Book recommenda...
Oct 22, 2024•44 min
Crime data has been a flashpoint in this election. Kamala Harris has claimed that violent crime is at a “near 50-year low,” while Donald Trump has insisted that crime is going up. According to the numbers reported to the F.B.I., Harris is right: Crime, especially violent crime, has been falling. But if you look at survey data, Trump is tapping into something people feel. Last year, 77 percent of Americans told Gallup that they believe crime is on the rise. So what’s going on here? Why, if crime ...
Oct 18, 2024•1 hr 32 min
As of this week, the archive of this show is behind a paywall. The three most recent episodes are free, but earlier episodes are available only to New York Times subscribers. If you don’t want the whole subscription, there’s an audio-only subscription for $1.50 a week. That gets you access to our archives, as well as the archives of all the other great Times podcasts. To help make the pitch here, I wanted to share an episode from our friends at the “Book Review” podcast. It’s hosted by Gilbert C...
Oct 15, 2024•48 min
In his new book of essays, “ The Message ,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May 2023. “I felt lied to,” he told me. “I felt lied to by my craft. I felt lied to by major media organizations.” Coates’s essay is a searing portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. It has also been criticized for leaving much out: Hamas is never mentioned. Nor is Oct. 7. Nor are any of the peace processes. So I asked him on the show to discuss what he saw when he was...
Oct 11, 2024•1 hr 20 min
On Oct. 6 of last year, the Biden administration was hammering out a grand Middle East bargain in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state. And even after Hamas’s attack the following day, the U.S. hoped to keep that deal alive to preserve the conditions for some kind of durable peace. But that deal is now basically unviable. The war is expanding. Israel may be on the verge of occupying Gaza indefinitely and possibly southern Lebanon, too. So w...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 31 min
The economy has hit a hinge moment. For the past few years, inflation has been the big economic story — the fixation of economic policymakers, journalists and almost everyone who goes to the grocery store. But economists now largely see inflation as tamed. It’s still a major political issue; the country continues to reel from years of rising prices, and there is a real affordability crisis. But that isn’t all the next administration will have to deal with. So what does it mean to fight the next ...
Oct 04, 2024•1 hr 30 min
The most consequential and revealing exchange during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday came toward the end, when JD Vance was asked whether he would seek to challenge this year’s election results. That one moment proved that he can’t be trusted with the office he seeks. But the 85 minutes preceding that moment had a lot of interesting policy discussion, so we couldn’t resist talking about that, too. This episode contains strong language. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinsh...
Oct 02, 2024•52 min
In a couple weeks, the archives of our show will only be available to subscribers. Here’s why that’s happening and what to expect. To learn more, go to nytimes.com/podcasts . Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Oct 01, 2024•4 min
I’ve been fascinated by the problem Donald Trump faces with Project 2025. Trump has been caught in an awkward position, disavowing the document itself, but unable to fully disavow the people behind it. So I wanted to do an episode not just on Trump, but on the unwieldy coalition that has formed around him — what is sometimes referred to as the “New Right.” Emily Jashinsky is the D.C. correspondent and host of “Undercurrents” for UnHerd, a co-host of “Counter Points” with Ryan Grim, and a former ...
Sep 27, 2024•1 hr 7 min
America has become increasingly polarized when it comes to trust. Voters who distrust the system — who see institutions as corrupt and are prone to conspiracy theories — have long existed on the far left and far right. But Donald Trump seems to have sparked a realignment, what the writer Matthew Yglesias calls “the crank realignment.” The G.O.P. is now the political home of the distrustful, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Trump endorsement was a clear sign of these changing times. In 2020, Pete Butt...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr
It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. The hostages are not all home, and it doesn’t look like there will be a cease-fire deal that brings them home anytime soon. Israeli politics is deeply divided, and the country’s international reputation is in tatters. The Palestinian Authority is weak. A war may break out in Lebanon soon. There is no vision for the day after and no theory of what comes next. So I wanted to talk to David Remnick, the editor of T...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 17 min
I stumbled on a Zadie Smith line recently that stopped me in my tracks. She was writing in January 2017, and describing the political stakes of that period — Brexit in the U.K., Trump in the U.S. — and the way you could feel it changing people. “Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Republicans want to label Kamala Harris as the border czar. And by just looking at a chart, you can see why. Border crossings were low when Donald Trump left office. But when President Biden is in the White House, they start shooting up and up — to numbers this country had never seen before, peaking in December 2023. Those numbers have fallen significantly since Biden issued tough new border policies. But that has still left Harris with a major vulnerability. Why didn’t the administration do mor...
Sep 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Tuesday night was the first — perhaps the only — debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And it proved one of Harris’s stump speech lines right: Turns out she really does know Trump’s type. She had a theory of who Trump was and how he worked, and she used it to take control of the collision. But this was a substantive debate, too. The candidates clashed on abortion, health care, the economy, energy, immigration and more. And so we delve into the policy arguments to untangle what was reall...
Sep 11, 2024•47 min
Our Times Opinion colleagues recently launched a new podcast called “ The Opinions .” It’s basically the Opinion page in audio form, so you can hear your favorite Times Opinion columnists and contributing writers in one place, in their own voices. It’s an eclectic and surprising mix of perspectives, as you’ll see with these two segments we’ve selected for you to enjoy. The first is with the Times Opinion columnist (and friend of the pod) David French, a lifelong conservative who’s staunchly pro-...
Sep 06, 2024•28 min
I feel that there’s something important missing in our debate over screen time and kids — and even screen time and adults. In the realm of kids and teenagers, there’s so much focus on what studies show or don’t show: How does screen time affect school grades and behavior? Does it carry an increased risk of anxiety or depression? And while the debate over those questions rages on, a feeling has kept nagging me. What if the problem with screen time isn’t something we can measure? In June, Jia Tole...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 11 min
I’m convinced that attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. We lament our attention issues all the time — how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene or spending habits or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying att...
Aug 30, 2024•57 min
We recently did an episode on the strange new gender politics that have emerged in the 2024 election. But we only briefly touched on the social and economic changes that underlie this new politics — the very real ways boys and men have been falling behind. In March 2023, though, we dedicated a whole episode to that subject. Our guest was Richard Reeves, the author of the 2022 book “ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It ,” who recently founde...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 59 min
On Thursday night, Kamala Harris reintroduced herself to America. And by the standards of Democratic convention speeches, this one was pretty unusual. In this conversation I’m joined by my editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss what Harris’s speech reveals about the candidate, the campaign she’s going to run and how she believes she can win in November. Mentioned: The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted mi...
Aug 23, 2024•44 min
Democrats spent the third night of their convention pitching themselves as the party of freedom. In this conversation, my producer Annie Galvin joined me on the show to take a deep look at that messaging. Why do Democrats see an opportunity in this election to seize an idea that Republicans have monopolized for decades? What’s the meaning of “freedom” that Democrats seem to be embracing? And how does this message square with other Democratic Party values, like belief in the ability of government...
Aug 22, 2024•43 min
Is Obamaism making a comeback? Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle and Barack Obama electrified the crowd with the most powerful speeches of the week so far, and seemed to anoint Kamala Harris as the inheritor of their political movement. For this audio diary, I’m joined by my producer Elias Isquith to dissect those two speeches. We discuss what Obamaism was in 2008 and 2012, and what it means to pass the baton to Harris in 2024. Mentioned: “ Biden Made Trump Bigger. Ha...
Aug 21, 2024•39 min
I’m reporting from the Democratic National Convention this week, so we’re going to try something a little different on the show — a daily audio report of what I’m seeing and hearing here in Chicago. For our first installment, I’m joined by my producer, Rollin Hu, to discuss what the convention’s opening night revealed about the Democratic Party after a tumultuous couple of months. We talk about how Joe Biden transformed the party over the past four years, the behind-the-scenes efforts to shape t...
Aug 20, 2024•32 min
A strange new gender politics is roiling the 2024 election. At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump made his nomination a show of campy masculinity, with Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, warming up the crowd. JD Vance’s first viral moments have been comments he made in 2021 about “childless cat ladies” running the Democratic Party and a “thought experiment” assigning extra votes to parents because they have more of an “investme...
Aug 16, 2024•1 hr 30 min
Risk has been on my mind this year. For Democrats, the question of whether Joe Biden should drop out was really a question about risk – the risk of keeping him on the ticket versus the risk of the unknown. And it’s hard to think through those kinds of questions when you have incomplete information and so much you can’t predict. After all, few election models forecast that Kamala Harris would have the kind of momentum we’ve seen the last few weeks. Nate Silver’s new book, “ On the Edge: The Art o...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 7 min
It’s been remarkable watching the Democratic Party act like a political party this past month — a party that makes decisions collectively, that does hard things because it wants to win, that is more than the vehicle for a single person’s ambitions. But parties are made of people. And in the weeks leading up to President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, it felt like the Democratic Party was made of one particular person: Nancy Pelosi. Two days after Biden released a forceful letter to co...
Aug 09, 2024•58 min
In picking Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris is after more than just Pennsylvania. Mentioned: “ Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need? ” by The Ezra Klein Show Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast . Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs . This episode of “Th...
Aug 06, 2024•30 min
The economy is one of the biggest vulnerabilities for Democrats this election and, in particular, the issue of affordability. Many Americans blame the Biden administration for the past few years of high inflation, and housing costs have become a crisis in cities across the country. These are top concerns for voters, and the Democratic Party hasn’t articulated the clearest answer. But there are some Democrats working hard on this and trying to push the party in a new direction. Brian Schatz is th...
Aug 06, 2024•50 min
I’ve watched a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can’t remember one in which the contest for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination has played out quite so publicly. One breakthrough voice has been Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Before last week, he didn’t have much of a national profile. But then he went on “Morning Joe” and said of Donald Trump and JD Vance, “These guys are just weird.” That one line has transformed the Democratic Party’s messaging, with everyone from Vice President Kamal...
Aug 02, 2024•59 min
Gretchen Whitmer is one of the names you often see on lists of Democratic V.P. contenders. She’s swatted that speculation down repeatedly, but the interest in her makes a lot of sense. Michigan is a must-win state for Democrats, and she has won the governorship of that state twice, by significant margins each time. She’s also long been one of the Democratic Party’s most talented and forthright messengers on abortion. So I think Whitmer has a lot to teach Democrats right now, whether she’s Kamala...
Jul 30, 2024•48 min
