Diane Rehm: On My Mind

Donald Trump owes the state of New York almost half-a-billion dollars in fines. This stems from a civil fraud suit that found the Trump Organization engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to lie about the value of their assets.

A deadline to pay is looming and his lawyers say the former president does not have the cash, nor can he find a company to cover the bond.

This comes on top of a 91.6 million dollar fine in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case that he posted earlier this month.

“He had been very glib about saying, oh I can afford it, easy peasy, I’m super rich,” says Edward Luce, U.S. editor and columnist for the Financial Times. “It turns out he obviously doesn’t have anything like that.”

Luce joins Diane on this episode of On My Mind to talk about Trump’s finances and what these legal penalties could mean for him and his candidacy.

How old is too old to be president? It’s a question many Americans are asking as Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off for the office.

President Biden is 81. Over the last four years, his hair has thinned, his gait has stiffened. And the media, not to mention his opponent, have pounced on his verbal gaffes, like when he mixed up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico, or when he seemed to momentarily forget the name of “Hamas.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is 77 and has experienced his own memory lapses, including when in a recent speech he said “Nikki Haley” was in charge of security on January 6th, when he clearly meant Nancy Pelosi.

“I wish we could separate our conversation about age and competency,” says Tracey Gendron, an expert on aging and author of the book “Ageism Unmasked.” She says that these issues with recall do not necessarily signify any underlying cognitive issues, but could happen to anyone, though admittedly increase as we age.

Tracey Gendron joins Diane on this episode of On My Mind to talk about memory, mental competency, and why she feels our conversation about age this election season is missing the mark.

Those who see Donald Trump as a threat to democracy have taken solace in the cases piling up against him.

There were civil cases that carried massive financial penalties. There were four criminal cases whose trials were set to take place before the November election. And there was the question of the Fourteenth Amendment that could have barred trump from the ballot.

But two recent Supreme Court decisions have changed that.

“It’s going to be Biden versus Trump,” says Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox. “There is no magical anything that is going to stop us from having an election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”

Millhiser writes about the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He joins Diane on this episode of On My Mind to talk about Trump’s recent legal victories and why he argues “the courts were never going to save American democracy.”

As the conflict between Israel and Hamas rages on, the level of human suffering in the Gaza Strip has come into clearer focus.

The death toll in Gaza surpassed 30,000 this week, according to the Gazan health ministry. The United Nations estimates that 2 million Palestinians in the territory have been internally displaced by war. New reports say nearly all of the 2.3 million people in the enclave face crisis levels of food insecurity. And at least one quarter of the population is one step away from famine.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a U.S. citizen from Gaza who has lost 31 family members so far in the conflict. He is also a Middle East analyst whose writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post. He joined Diane on this week’s episode of On My Mind to share his family’s story — and what it says about the broader humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Last week the Russian government announced the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s harshest and most well-known critic.

For more than a decade, Navalny campaigned against the corruption of Vladimir Putin and his allies. He ran for mayor of Moscow, crisscrossed the country in an attempted run for president, and offered a younger generation a glimpse of a post-Putin Russia.

During that time, he also endured arrests, beatings, and in 2020, a near fatal poisoning. At the time of his death, he was imprisoned at a penal colony in the Arctic on what his supporters say were politically motivated charges.

“Navalny was the plan for the day after,” says Julia Ioffe, longtime journalist who covers Russia and U.S.-Russia relations. Even behind bars, she says, he represented hope for those who opposed Putin’s power.

Ioffe joins Diane on this episode of On My Mind to discuss the life, death and legacy of Alexei Navalny.

Last week Supreme Court justices heard arguments about whether the state of Colorado could ban Donald Trump from the ballot. This week, Trump petitioned the justices to temporarily block a decision by a federal appeals court regarding his claim of presidential immunity.

“The real question to me is how do these two cases, the Colorado case and the January 6th prosecution, end up fitting together,” says Stephen Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas School of Law and author of the New York Times bestseller “The Shadow Docket.”

Vladeck joined Diane on this episode of On My Mind to explain these cases and why, together, they highlight the role today’s Supreme Court plays in the country’s democracy.

For more from Stephen Vladeck, you can read his newsletter, One First.

In 2020 Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed a measure that decriminalized drug use. Since the law went into effect three years ago, homelessness in the state has increased, the rate of overdose deaths has risen sharply and the support for decriminalization has plummeted.

Now, Oregon legislators on both sides of the aisle are considering overturning the measure, reinstating a more “law and order” approach to addiction.

“Drugs are a symptom of what’s going on,” says Maia Szalavitz, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times who covers addiction and public policy. “Drugs are not the primary cause of what happened.”

Szalavitz joins Diane on the latest episode of On My Mind to talk about the fight over decriminalizing drugs in Oregon – and what it means for the rest of the country.

Over the last year, a leap in technology has put powerful generative AI tools in the hands of practically anyone with a computer. This means creating fake audio, images, and video has never been easier.

“That’s a democratization of a technology that should terrify us,” says Hany Farid, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “Because now I can make the president of the United States, or a candidate for the highest office in the United States, say anything I want them to say.”

Farid is an expert in artificial intelligence and disinformation who is tracking the use of AI in the 2024 election. He worries that widespread access to these powerful new technologies will exacerbate pre-existing challenges to our democracy, particularly a shared understanding of truth itself. “I think it’s like throwing jet fuel onto a dumpster fire,” Farid tells Diane in the latest episode of On My Mind.

Visit Hany Farid’s website to see how AI has been used in the 2024 election: farid.berkeley.edu/deepfakes2024election

A record surge of migrants at the U.S.- Mexico border has pushed politicians on both sides of the aisle to look for ways to ease pressure on what many consider to be an overloaded, out-of-date, and needlessly bureaucratic immigration system.

Yet, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Molly O’Toole says the focus of negotiations misses the mark when it comes to finding real solutions to the current crisis at the border.

“We first need to understand who is coming, why they are coming, and where they are coming from,” she explains, adding that the demographics of the migrants crossing into the United States over the southern border has changed dramatically since the 1990s, but the proposed solutions have not.

In the latest episode of On My Mind, O’Toole outlines what she thinks is missing from the country’s current immigration debate.

In poll after poll, voters around the country say their number one issue is the economy. Which should be good news for President Biden as we approach the November election. The job market is strong, the stock market is up, and inflation is down.

And yet, a December 2023 Gallup poll, showed that four in five U.S. adults rate the country’s current economic conditions as “poor” or “fair.” Meanwhile, voters in swing states say they trust Donald Trump more than Joe Biden as an economic leader.

“There are a bunch of things that have conspired to perpetuate the narrative of a bad economy even as the reality is kind of a miracle,” says Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate in economics.

Krugman joins Diane to offer his perspective on just how healthy the U.S. economy is under Biden, was under Trump, and whether either man should actually get credit for it.