Trump is a master at wielding attention. He’s been owning news cycles and squatting in Americans’ minds for much of the last decade. And for his second term he has an ally in Elon Musk, a man with a similar uncanny skill set. Trump and Musk seem to have figured out something about how attention works in our fragmented media age — and how to use it for political and cultural power — that Democrats simply haven’t. So what is it? What do they understand about attention that their opponents don’t? C...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Joe Biden wanted to show Americans that there was a better path than Trumpism. He worked to build a “foreign policy for the middle class.” He centered industrial policy. He took a more competitive tack with China. He kept America out of wars. The hope was that if Americans saw foreign policy serving their interests, then that would dim the appeal of someone like Donald Trump. Then Trump won again — stronger than ever. Jake Sullivan is Biden’s national security adviser and one of the key architec...
Jan 14, 2025•1 hr 8 min
The preview we’ve had into Donald Trump’s second administration already feels, by American standards, disturbingly abnormal: Picking a former “Fox and Friends” host for defense secretary. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to Mar-a-Lago to curry favor with the president-elect. The Washington Post withholding an opposing endorsement. Meta ending its third-party fact-checking. But all of this is actually pretty normal — not in the U.S. but in many other countries. Researchers call them persona...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 7 min
I like to begin each year with an episode about something I’m working through more personally. And at the end of last year, the thing I needed to work through was a pretty bad case of burnout. So I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s latest book, “ Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts .” Burkeman’s big idea, which he also explores in his best seller “ Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals ,” is that the desire to be more productive, to ...
Jan 07, 2025•1 hr 5 min
I have a tendency to end the year feeling pretty worn out. And that’s partly because I struggle to rest properly throughout the year, to build rest into a routine and stick to it. That’s how I was feeling at the end of 2022, when we originally taped this episode. And it’s certainly how I’m feeling at the end of this year, so this felt like a valuable episode to revisit. Judith Shulevitz’s wonderful book, “ The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time ,” draws out lessons from the Jew...
Dec 27, 2024•1 hr 2 min
There’s a lot to process as 2024 draws to a close. In our end-of-year Ask Me Anything, the supervising editor of “The Ezra Klein Show,” Claire Gordon, joins Ezra in the studio to ask your questions – on politics, and lots of not-politics too. Ezra talks about the ways this year has affected him personally: how his views on government have changed; his efforts to stave off burnout; and his off-again, on-again relationship with social media. They also discuss the making of the show: the accusation...
Dec 24, 2024•51 min
In 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, ushering in, by some estimates, nearly half a trillion dollars of investment in green energy and manufacturing. But what will happen to this huge investment as Donald Trump enters office? Jigar Shah is one of the best people to answer this question. As the director of the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy, he has spent his career finding new ways to finance green infrastructure. And he’s more optimistic than you might ex...
Dec 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Donald Trump will enter office at a time when presidential power has significantly expanded, because of a string of Supreme Court decisions in recent years. These decisions can be understood to have two functions: They give presidents a “sword” to act more decisively and unilaterally, and a “shield” that protects them from prosecution against actions taken in their official capacity. What will these capacities mean for Trump’s second term — especially as he has promised to radically transform th...
Dec 17, 2024•45 min
This election felt like the peak of the TV-ification of politics. There’s Trump, of course, who rose to national prominence as a reality-TV character and is a master of visual stagecraft. And while Trump’s cabinet picks in his first term were described as out of central casting, this time he wants to staff some positions directly from the worlds of TV and entertainment: Pete Hegseth, his choice to run the Pentagon, was a host on “Fox and Friends Weekend”; his proposed education secretary, Linda ...
Dec 13, 2024•1 hr 4 min
This is our first bonus content of the paywall era, a subscriber-only, election-themed “ask me anything.” If you haven’t subscribed and would like to, you can do that directly through Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or click here . If you don’t want to subscribe, you’ll still have an end-of-year “ask me anything” coming down your feed — a mix of politics and things in life that, thankfully, aren’t politics. And if you do subscribe, thank you so much for supporting the show. We hope you enjoy this li...
Dec 10, 2024•41 min
It was possible to see Donald Trump’s first election victory as some kind of fluke. But after the results of this election, it’s clear that America is living in the Trump era. And for Americans who’ve struggled to process this fact, you have lots of company around the world. From Hungary to Brazil, right-wing figures with openly authoritarian goals have been voted into power, to the concern of many of the people who live there. A political phenomenon that spans countries like this — especially c...
Dec 06, 2024•1 hr 31 min
Right after the election, I talked about how the results reminded me of 2004. George W. Bush won re-election that year — and unlike four years earlier, the popular vote, too. Democrats were truly, undeniably in the wilderness. But two years later, they found their way out. Democrats won the House for the first time in 12 years. And two years after that, with the election of Barack Obama, they completed their trifecta. Does that comeback story have any lessons for Democrats today? Rahm Emanuel is...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 12 min
There are a lot of different opinions about how the Democratic Party should rebuild after the blow of Donald Trump’s victory. And for the next two episodes, we’re going to showcase two very different ones. Faiz Shakir was Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign manager, and he believes that Democrats need to embrace a Sanders-style class-first populism. This question of whether Sanders or a candidate like him could have beaten Trump loomed over Democratic post-mortems of the 2016 election, and they’ve re...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 16 min
The core conflict in our politics right now is over institutions. Democrats defend them, while Republicans distrust them, and seek, in some cases, to eliminate them. This is really bad. It’s bad for institutions when Republicans are elected, because of the damage they might inflict. And it’s bad for institutions when Democrats are elected, because when you’re so committed to protecting something, it’s hard to be clear-eyed or honest about all the ways it’s failing. And when Democrats won’t admit...
Nov 22, 2024•1 hr 9 min
I’ve been watching since the election to see what timeline we’re in. And Donald Trump’s first wave of selections for appointees were pretty straightforward. But then came the turn: Pete Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends” host, to helm the Pentagon; Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence; and the real gut-punch, the former representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general. In the parts of government that can be weaponized most dangerously — the military, the intelligence services, the De...
Nov 19, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 1
The Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging nonwhite and working-class voters. There are a lot of theories about why that has been happening, blaming it on the party’s ideas or messaging or campaign tactics. But I think the problem might be deeper than that — rooted in the structure of the Democratic Party itself. Michael Lind is a columnist at Tablet magazine, a co-founder of New America and the author of “ The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite .” He argues that the Democ...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr 5 min
To understand the 2024 election results, it helps to go back to 2020. Donald Trump lost the election that year, but he made significant gains with nonwhite voters. At the time, a lot of Democrats saw that as a fluke, a hangover from Covid lockdown policies. But the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini saw it as bellwether. In his 2023 book, “ Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP ,” Ruffini argued that Trump was ushering in a party realignment. A trend th...
Nov 09, 2024•1 hr 2 min
The coalition the Democratic Party built in the Obama years has crumbled. But Democrats can choose how to respond. Mentioned: “ Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden ” 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 “The Ezra...
Nov 07, 2024•37 min
In 2010, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a satirical rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., called the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. This was amid the Tea Party movement. Political emotions were running high. And Stewart ended the rally with a speech slamming the media for stoking the country’s divisions. “But we live now in hard times, not end times,” he said. “And we can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.”...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Our politics are increasingly divided on fundamental issues like the legitimacy of elections and the nature and integrity of the basic systems of American government. That’s the most important fact of this election. But strange new zones of agreement have been emerging, too — on China, outsourcing and health care. What should we make of that? In his book “ The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order ” the historian Gary Gerstle describes these shifts in consensus in terms of political orders — the...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 28 min
Vivek Ramaswamy burst onto the national scene last year as a wild card candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Here was a relatively unknown biotech executive with no political experience, pitching himself as someone who could carry on Donald Trump’s movement. Trump ultimately won that primary contest handily, but Ramaswamy was a breakout star. There was even chatter that he might be Trump’s V.P. pick. Trump, of course, ended up choosing JD Vance — Ramaswamy’s friend and former cla...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 23 min
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
