Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been as unstable as the man himself, shifting quickly from pushes for restraint to escalating wars in the Middle East. This volatility is a function not just of Trump’s personality but the contradictions and competing factions that are gathered under the term America First, as well as the continued power of the foreign policy establishment that Trump has claimed he defeated but which maintains a strong capacity to shape policy. To talk about Trump’s foreign poli...
Jul 13, 2025•42 min
Writing in The Nation , Pamela Alma Weymouth drew a contrast between Kay Graham, her late grandmother who was publisher of The Washington Post when it fought Richard Nixon’s administration on The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, with the current owner of the newspaper, Jeff Bezos. Unlike Graham, Bezos has been all too willing to bend the knee to a corrupt president. I talked to Pamela about Bezos and other contemporary corporate leaders who are undermining journalistic integrity at a moment when i...
Jul 06, 2025•37 min
Over the last decade, centrist Democrats have diligent courted Never Trump Republicans, hoping that this cohort could help create a new consensus politics to oppose the MAGA coalition. From the start, this strategy seemed flawed: after all, this faction is very small and also carries a lot of baggage. In particular, neo-conservatives such as William Kristol and David Frum, now Never Trump stalwarts, were responsible for two of the biggest foreign policy disasters in American history, George W. B...
Jun 29, 2025•54 min
Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported that Elon Musk, currently trying to mend a feud with his quondam political ally Donald Trump, is a heavy user of mind alternating substances ranging from Ketamine to LSD to mushrooms to cocaine. While this story has been treated as one about the foibles of one increasingly erratic powerful man, it has wider implications. The financial journalist Jacob Silverman, author of an upcoming book about Musk, notes that there is a wider dr...
Jun 15, 2025•43 min
Michael Ledeen, who died on May 17 at age 83, was a prominent figure on the American right since the 1970s. He is most famous, or notorious, as one of the instigators of the Iran/Contra scandal, helping to connect the Reagan administration with an Iranian arms dealer. Beyond that, he was active not just as a writer but also as an activists who often promoted disinformation, most notably the lie about the “weapons of mass destruction” the was used to sell George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. On thi...
Jun 01, 2025•46 min
The late David Horowitz, who died in April at age 86, was often dismissed as a fringe figure not just by liberals and leftists but even many on the right. Horowitz would often complain that his books — crude polemics with titles such as BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020) and The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America (2021) — were ignored by respectable conservative publications such as National Review and Commentary. Horowitz got one thing right: that both ...
May 25, 2025•52 min
On his latest trip to the Middle East, Donald Trump is making big news. He’s indicating a receptiveness to making a deal with Iran trading normalization for nuclear non-proliferation. He ended the bombing campaign against Yemen and is also pushing for normalization with Syria. Further, the White House has sidestepped Israel in order to have direct talks with Hamas. These moves have angered some hawks in the GOP as well as the Israeli government. But will Trump’s attempt to shift America’s policy...
May 18, 2025•43 min
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jacob Silverman on why it’s hard to regulate the high tech ponzi economics. Over the last few years, crypto-currency has emerged as a political powerhouse, thanks to tens of billions in campaign donations. As Jacob Silverman reports in a recent feature in The Nation , “crypto, despite being a relative flop commercially, has infiltrated American politics.” This is most bluntly obvious in Donald Trump, who has become a crypto king in corrupt schemes that ha...
May 11, 2025•48 min
Silicon Valley has moved to the right in the last few years, with Elon Musk being the public face of a larger trend of tech lords aligning themselves with Trumpism. We now have a window into just how reactionary Silicon Valley has become thanks to reporting about private group chats where the tech elite gather to complain about wokeness and celebrate Donald Trump’s plutocrat-friendly policies. My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann wrote about these group chats in a recent column . He joins the podca...
May 04, 2025•42 min
Donald Trump’s tariff war is usually framed in terms of how it would impact consumers and America’s relationship with other countries, but it is also part of a larger project to remake taxation policy. Trump is very explicit that he wants tariffs to replace personal and corporate taxes with tariffs as the main source of revenue. As such, tariffs are a sales tax, of a particularly regressive sort. I talk to Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah , about how tariff’s fit in wit...
Apr 27, 2025•44 min
Even as he imposes authoritarianism on the United States, Donald Trump has given a new lease on life to the center left in many other countries. Canada is holding an election at the end of April under the shadow of the American presidents threat to turn it into the 51st state. Until Trump’s inauguration, the Conservative Party of Canada had a commanding lead. But voters are changing their minds fast and it now looks like the Liberal Party under new leader Mark Carney will win the election. To ta...
Apr 20, 2025•51 min
By helping the Republicans pass a spending bill that made no compromises with the Democrats and extend Donald Trump’s power over the government, Chuck Schumer has made himself widely unpopular in his own party. Anger at Schumer is so intense that he had to cancel parts of his tour to promote his new book Antisemitism in America: A Warning . David Klion, Nation columnist and frequent guest on the podcast, reviewed this volume for The Baffler. He joins to podcast to discuss both the book and the m...
Apr 06, 2025•56 min
This week Washington was abuzz with a security scandal over a group chat planning the bombing of Yemen accidentally included magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Lost amid the finger pointing about operational security was the fact that the bombing of Yemen is illegal, immoral, and ineffective. To take up the actual scandal of the war, I spoke with Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. We also discuss the actual contents of the group chat which ...
Mar 30, 2025•31 min
The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas turned out to be short lived: Israel has now decisively broken the ceasefire and launched an even more intense onslaught into Gaza. Coupled with this renewed attack, Israel (sometimes in conjunction with the united States) is also carrying on military campaigns against Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, with rumors floating of a new attack on Iran. I discuss this rapid resumption of regional strife with Yousef Munayyer of the Arab Center Washington, D.C . Advertisin...
Mar 23, 2025•45 min
For nearly seven decades, Noam Chomsky has been the most important critic of American foreign policy. Daniel Besser, co-host of the Nation podcast, American Prestige , recently reviewed for the magazine a new book authored by Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson, The Myth of American Idealism . In his review, Daniel both extolled Chomsky’s monumental achievement and raised questions about the weakness of antiwar movements in challenging the terrible policies that Chomsky has so diligently analyzed. Da...
Mar 09, 2025•42 min
During his first term in office, Donald Trump often talked about his radical America First agenda but in practice his foreign policy was that of a conventional Republican hawk. Just five weeks into his second term, there has been a marked shift. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted in The Guardian , Trump 2.0 is marked by a turn towards a foreign policy that is much more focused on the Western hemisphere and away from Europe and m...
Mar 02, 2025•29 min
Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column . Chris and I talk about Trump’s mobil...
Feb 01, 2025•37 min
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Matt Duss on a popular right-wing fabulist. Has former president Barack Obama secretly been running the American elite — including the media and wide parts of the government — for nearly 20 years? Has he been doing so on behalf of a subversive agenda to empower Iran and undermine American exceptionalism? That’s the argument made by David Samuels in a much-read piece in The Tablet . On this episode, I dissect Samuels arguments with two frie...
Jan 04, 2025•46 min
Matthew Yglesias, a very influential journalist and proprietor of the Slow Boring substack , has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a glib attention seeker who has achieved prominence by coming up with clever ways to justify the status quo. For this episode of the podcast, I talked to David Klion, frequent guest...
Dec 08, 2024•1 hr 6 min
For this week’s podcast, I’m posting a talk I gave at Carleton University earlier this month on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking. But as I argue, this strategy is deeply flawed since voters who respond to antisystem arguments are ...
Dec 01, 2024•38 min
The one good thing about defeat is you can learn some lessons. But what if the lessons you learn are the wrong ones. In the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, pundits and Democratic strategists have already been drawing lessons. Unfortunately, as Branko Marcetic documents in a recent piece in Jacobin, many of these lessons are in fact myths, designed to exculpate those responsible for the electoral disaster while scapegoating groups that have much less power. On this episode...
Nov 24, 2024•43 min
Donald Trump and JD Vance have a surprising closing message in the 2024 election: they are the antiwar candidate. About the rising conflict in the Middle East, Trump has said, “I wanna see it all stop, I wanna see the Middle East get back to peace.” On a podcast, Vance criticized the Biden “Even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, they pursued the pathway that maximizes those casualties. They say that they're pro-Israel. They've pursued the pathway that has pro...
Nov 03, 2024•32 min
On this episode of The Time of Monsters , Jeet Heer is joined by David Klion to discuss 'The Apprentice' — a movie about Roy Cohn’s mentoring of a future president. --- Donald Trump is such a clearly defined figure — a walking, talking political cartoon — that it’s hard to imagine when he was someone different. Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice , gives us a Trump we’re not used to seeing, a young man who was unsure of himself and found his path thanks to the mentoring of Roy Cohn, the notori...
Oct 27, 2024•42 min
As the presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s hard to ignore evidence of Donald Trump is increasingly erratic behavior: his slurring of words, his freezing up during questions, his repeated cancellations of interviews, and the bizarre incident at a town hall in Pennsylvania, where Trump unexpectedly spent more than half an hour bobbing and tottering on stage to a selection of his favorite tunes . My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann wrote about this event . He joins me to talk about Tru...
Oct 20, 2024•36 min
More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker . The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie or not, the uncontestable fact is it is rich in ideas and offers much to talk about. To talk about t...
Oct 13, 2024•52 min
The Israeli incursion into Lebanon has rapidly shifted from a bombing campaign into a ground invasion, one that the Pentagon now says might last for some time. This current escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict, which has also seen Iran and Israel trade blows, reflects the wider failure of Joe Biden’s bear-hug foreign policy. To discuss the conflict and also the prospect for change under a Kamala Harris presidency, I talked to Matt Duss, a seasoned foreign policy analyst at the Center for In...
Oct 06, 2024•27 min
Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces in neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises the question of Biden’s bear-hug strategy, which the administration argues would help foster peace and restraint. Thi...
Sep 22, 2024•26 min
Kamala Harris and many other Democrats often warn that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. This is true enough, but it raises the question of how a ridiculous reality-TV star got in a position to be so dangerous. The excellent new podcast Master Plan shows that democracy has been under siege in the United States for decades due to a concerted effort to let corporations dominate the commanding heights of power. I talk to David Sirota, who along with the team at The Lever , created the podcast....
Sep 15, 2024•40 min
After the convention and on the cusp of a debate, the presidential election is a near dead heat. The polls show Kamala Harris has a slight edge, but it is well within the margin of error. This is a massive improvement over the performance of Joe Biden, who was on a path to a major defeat but it is by no means a guarantee of victory. To take up the state of the race, I talk to analyst Joshua A. Cohen, who writes for The Nation and runs the Ettingermentum newsletter . We take up both what Harris h...
Sep 07, 2024•36 min
On June 28, I delivered a speech at the central branch of the Regina Public Library on the history of American support for Israel. The speech almost didn’t happen. The library briefly cancelled it because they claimed the group promoting it was encouraging discrimination against Jews. Fortunately, a city councillor intervened to sponsor the talk. For this podcast, I give the gist of my talk. The podcast will be going on a summer break and return in a few weeks. Advertising Inquiries: https://red...
Jul 07, 2024•25 min
