John is joined by Alex Wagner, MSNBC primetime host and Heilemann’s former co-star on The Circus, to discuss the big news stories of this past week and cultural touchstones of this past year. Wagner explains how Trump’s efforts at appearing reasonable in his recent Meet The Press interview were foiled by his “spikes of insanity” around freeing imprisoned January 6 rioters, jailing Liz Cheney, and ending birthright citizenship; analyzes his naming of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr's former fiancee, to be the U.S. ambassador to Greece; and weighs in on the hero worship in certain quarters of Luigi Mangione, accused murderer of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Alex also reveals the music, movies, TV, and books that slayed her in 2024, as well as her secret history as the author of the beloved (by John, at least) fake food blog The Last Pancake.

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John is joined by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries to discuss this year’s election, next year’s Congress, and the agita about his party’s future. Jeffries argues that although the Democratic performance on November 5 was undeniably “disappointing,” it was hardly catastrophic; that of all of Donald Trump’s disconcerting appointments, RFK, Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services may be the most dangerous; and that while he disagrees with Mike Johnson about much, he sees the speaker as a “good man” whom he can do business with (neither of which he could say so readily about Kevin McCarthy). Jeffries also describes how his new children’s book, The ABCs of Democracy, was influenced by Schoolhouse Rock, and offers his (solid) list of the all-time top five rap MCs and (unassailable) opinion that The Wire is the greatest TV show ever made.

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John is joined by Pete Wehner—veteran of the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 administrations turned eloquent Never Trumper—to discuss the once and future president's transformation of the GOP, his perplexing appeal to the Christian Right, and more. Wehner explains why the best summation of Trump’s agenda comes from Michel Caine as Alfred in The Dark Knight (“Some men just want to watch the world burn”); Pete Hegseth’s redemption narrative and invocations of his Lord and savior ring so hollow; and so many Evangelicals are so devoted to Trump in spite of his lack of godly virtues. Wehner and John also harken back to the magical duet of Tracy Chapman's Fast Car by Chapman and Luke Combs at this year's Grammy's, and riff on why the emotional outpouring it triggered was a hopeful sign for our politics and culture.

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John is joined by Tina Brown, the legendary magazine editrix and his former boss at The New Yorker, to discuss American politics and media at the end of a year of convulsive upheaval in both. Tina riffs on Donald Trump’s reality show transition and its freak show appointments; the soap operatic, still largely untold story of Joe Biden’s family and how it has driven him (notably but not solely by means of the pardon of his son, Hunter) to undermine his legacy as president; the death of the magazine business, her new incarnation as a Substacker, and the broader trends that have leeched both the vitality and sheer fun out of the journalism racket. Tina also explains why she found the new Netflix documentary on Martha Stewart at once so excellent and so sad.

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John is joined by two renowned veterans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, and Andrew Weissmann, former FBI general counsel under Robert Mueller—to discuss Donald Trump’s plan to appoint one of his most controversial loyalists, Kash Patel, to be the bureau’s next director. Figliuzzi and Weissmann weigh in on Patel’s qualifications for the job, his ideas for radically restructuring and reorienting the FBI, his vows to use federal law enforcement to target Trump’s adversaries, and his espousal of a panoply of far-right conspiracy theories. The two former G-men also assess Pam Bondi, Trump’s replacement pick for Attorney General after the withdrawal of Matt Gaetz; Joe Biden’s blanket pardon for his son, Hunter; and Steve Bannon’s focus on seeing Weissmann jailed for unspecified Deep State transgressions.

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John is joined by the actor, director, writer, and producer Griffin Dunne to discuss The Friday Afternoon Club, his recent memoir about his famous literary family. Dunne offers intimate portraits of his sister Dominique, an actress on the rise four decades ago (having starred in Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist in 1982) who was strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend; his father, Dominick, whose coverage of Dominique’s murder trial in Vanity Fair turned him into the marquee chronicler of celebrity true-crime cases of the Eighties and Nineties, from O.J. Simpson to Claus von Bulow to the Menendez brothers; and his aunt, the legendary Joan Didion, about whom Griffin made an acclaimed Netflix documentary. Dunne also discusses the highlights of own acting career, from playing the lead in the Martin Scorsese cult classic After Hours to his memorable cameo in the first season of Succession. 

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To kick off Thanksgiving week, John is joined by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, to discuss what, if anything, we have to be thankful for. Remnick observes that, on the basis of all early evidence, the most alarmist prospective fears about Donald Trump’s second term are looking more prescient than paranoid; there are encouraging signs that Democrats understand the urgency of changing their tune regarding class and identity politics; the near-term future in Israel and the Middle East promises little but “horror all around;” and while art and culture can be a balm in troubled times, Remnick harbors scant hope for the forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothee Chalemet—in fact, ”I’m dreading it,” he says.

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John is joined by Julian Castro, former mayor of San Antonio and secretary of Housing & Urban Development, and Paola Ramos, award-winning journalist and author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, to discuss Donald Trump’s gains with Latino voters in 2024. Castro and Ramos argue that, given the inroads Trump made with Hispanics between 2016 and 2020, his improved performance with them this year is less surprising than it seems; that his appeal to the Latino community wasn’t simply about high prices or economic anxiety but culture, crime, and even immigration and race; that the jury is out on whether we’re witnessing a lasting realignment or a Trump-specific phenomenon; but that, either way, it should serve as a wake-up call to a Democratic Party that for years has taken brown-skinned voters for granted.

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John is joined by Tom Nichols, professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and staff writer for The Atlantic, to discuss Donald Trump’s foreign policy appointments and the challenges he will face upon his return to the Oval Office. Nichols offers a tour d’horizon of global hotspots, from Ukraine to the Middle East, that will test Trump’s mettle immediately and with huge implications for U.S. vital interests; his assessment of how America’s foreign adversaries, from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, view his return to power (spoiler alert: not unhappily); and his argument as to why, amid a raft of objectionable Trump appointments, the selection of Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense is the most irresponsible and dangerous, both abroad and at home.

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John is joined by America’s best-known presidential historians, Michael Beschloss and Jon Meacham, to discuss the first two weeks of the transition to Donald Trump’s second term. Beschloss and Meacham assess the most head-spinning of Trump’s initial appointments and their prospects for confirmation; why the sense of shock these picks have elicited, even among Republicans, is ludicrous on its face; the role of Steve Bannon as the intellectual architect of Trump’s radical governing agenda and its central goal of what Bannon calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state;” and why it’s safe to assume that what we’re seeing now is what the next four years will look like.

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